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MR. CHARLES HALLOCK. 



An ANGLER'S Reminiscences, 



A RECORD OF SPORT, TRAVEL 
AND ADVENTURE. 



WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR. 



BY 

Charles Hallock, 

"DEAN OF AMERICAN SPORTSMEN.' 

Author of " The Fishing Tourist," " Peerless Alaska, 
"Sportsmen's Gazetteer," Etc., Etc. 



Notes and Introductory Chapter 

by 

FRED E. pond: (" WILL WlLD\X'OOD.") 



CINCINNATI, 0. 
sportsmen's review pub. CO. 

1913. 



\\^ 



COPYRIGHT, 1913. 

SPORTSMEN'S REVIEW PUBLISHING CO., 
CINCINNATI, OHIO. 



©CI,A:]5iB8 5 



CONTENTS. 



Introductory Chapter VII 

CHAPT. PAGE 

I Record of a Busy Life 1 

II Angling Days and Angling Writers 10 

III Fishing Jaunts and Angling Associates 17 

IV Early Recollections 25 

V In the Sunny South 34 

VI A Sojourn in Florida 38 

VII The Wild West 42 

VIII Literary Work and Travel 46 

IX Park Region of Minnesota 53 

X The Undine Fishing Party Under Fire 56 

XI Random Casts in the Land of Lakes 60 

XII A Perilous Adventure at Kanawha Falls 64 

XIII The Princess and the Salmon 68 

XIV Trouting on Long Island — Opening of the Season 74 

XV American Angling Literature 76 

XVI A June Rise on the Godbout 87' 

XVII Anent the Salmon 90 

XVIII Let Us Commune Together 94 

XIX Arctic Fishing in Subtropical Waters 97 

XX The New Dispensation of Fishes 100 

XXI Bobbing for Eels 104 

XXII Why Fish Don't Always Bite, etc 106 

XXIII "Fysshe and Fyssheynge" Ill 

XXIV "Fysshe and Fyssheynge" (Concluded) 118 

XXV Progressive Fish Culture 124 

XXVI Record of Life Work for Fifty-Eight Vcars 127 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Portrait of Charles Hallock — Frontispiece. page 

Hallock Castle 11 - 

Salmon Spearing on the Restigouche 13 

Mt. Katahdin from Near Abol Carry 15 

Domine Olmstead and Mr. Charles F. Hotchkiss 16 

Mr. Walter M. Brackett and Mr. Colin Campbell 18 

Com. J. U. Gregory and Mr. W. F. Whitcher 19 

Mr. Allan Gilmour and Allan Gilmour's Fishing Camp 31 

Flatheads and Prospectors at Kalispel, Mont 23 

Early Railroad Train in Florida 40 

Mr. Fayette S. Giles and Mr. H. H. Thompson 47 

Fort George Island Hotel 73 

Salmon Fishing on the Miramichi River 93 

FULL PAGE PORTRAITS. 

Isaac McLellan (Facing) 26 

Spencer F. Baird , " 32 

Dr. A. J. Woodcock " 42 / 

Friends of Charles Hallock " 46 '^ 

Dr. W. F. Carver " 50 / 

Wm. C. Harris " 94 

Robert B. Roosevelt " 102 

Fred. Mather " 124 '' 

Prof. G. Brown Goode " 126 

Charles Hallock Under Ancestral Trees " 132 ' 



INTRODUCTORY. 



Charles Hallock's literary career, covering a period of sixty years — beginning 
with the editorship of a college paper, "The Scorpion," at Amherst, in 18-52 — has 
been remarkable for wide range, and thorough mastery of each subject. Although 
angling has always been his favorite recreation his active participation in other 
manly outdoor sports is indicated by the title, "Dean of American Sportsmen," con- 
ferred by prominent brothers of the guild in recognition of his ability as a practical 
exponent of healthful pastimes, and as an author — an acknowledged authority — in 
this branch of literature. Turning to the brief autobiography in this volume — 
a classic in its special line— the reader will find some of the salient features of a 
life work great in achievement, varied in scope — from scientific research to current 
comment on the topics of the day; from sojourning in the Sunny South to pioneer 
jaunts in the wild West and to far-off Alaska — yet interspersed always with pursuit 
of the pastimes he loved, with rod and gun. 

His recreations — like those of "Christopher North" — furnished material for 
delightful sketches, standard works, scientific essays. His companions were men 
of action — the hardy voyageurs, at home in primitive craft on wild waters, or on 
foot along wild trails : ardent anglers seeking adventurous sport on salmon rivers 
and trout streams far from routes of ordinary tourists ; scholars and scientists 
delving deep in the study of animated nature. 

That Charles Hallock is and has long been a recognized force, an accepted 
authority in matters pertaining to fish and fishing, science and travel, is evidenced 
by the fact that he is an active or honorary member of no less than fifty-seven 
clubs and associations, many of these being organizations of national and some of 
international scope. His copyrighted books are seventeen in number, and his various 
articles in the magazines, sportsmen's journals and daily press would, if collected 
in library form, fill fifty volumes of absorbing interest'. The condensed summary, 
given elsewhere in this work, records the remarkable fact that outside of newspaper 
work his occupations and important experiments reached a total of sixtj'-seven, 
while his hairbreadth escapes numbered twenty-eight. 

As an editor, particularly in his favorite field, he possessed the qualifications to 
acquire the full measure of success. His literary style was here shown in its 
versatile character, its vigor, and perfect command of the English language. A 
valuable adjunct was his world-wide acquaintance with men of mark in sportsman- 
ship and the world of letters. He probably knew personally a larger percentage oi 
his prominent contrilnitors than any predecessor in the realm of sportsmen's 



journalism, with the possible exception of William T. Porter — the honored pioneer, 
termed "York's Tall Son," by reason of his personal popularity and his height of 
six foot four. 

The chronological record of Charles Hallock's literary work gives ample 
evidence of his versatile ability as a writer. It may not be generally known that he 
has written a number of creditable poems, replete with humor and sentiment, the 
most noteworthy of these being "California," an epic illustrating frontier life in the 
Golden State; "New Year's Calls," a parody on "Marco Bozarris;" the "Legend 
of Kill Devil Hole;" "My Briarwood Pipe," and "An Ode to a Nose." 

This volume, "An Angler's Reminiscences," first appeared as a serial in the 
columns of The Sportsmen's Review^, attracting widespread attention, and the 
chapters on fish and fishing— with an autobiography from the graphic pen of the 
Dean himself — have been selected to make up a book of interest to all who love 
the great out-of-doors and appreciate the classic literature of angling. It is a 
worthy companion piece to place on the library shelf with Charles Hallock's "Fish- 
ing Tourist," the earliest of his published volumes, issued forty years ago, and will 
be regarded as a crowning work of a long life of honorable achievement. 

To the writer the task of collecting and selecting the chapters for preservation 
in book form proved highly enjoyable, and while minor mistakes have doubtless 
crept in, on account of lack of time to carefully collate from the serial in the 
Sportsmen's Reviem^^ it is hoped the reader will generously overlook the errors 
of the editor, or at least place responsibility for these on the writer of this brief 
Introductory, who has gathered a boquet of choice flowers — "with nothing of his 
own except the cord that binds them." 

Will Wildwood. 



CHAPTER I. 



RECORD OF A BUSY LIFE. 




HARLES HALLOCK, editor, author and naturalist, was born in New 
York City March 13, 1834, son of Gerard and Eliza (Allen) Hallock. 
The family was founded in America when Peter Hallock (or Holy- 
oake) located at Southold, L. I., thirteen colonists, led by Rev. John 
Young, of Hingham, Norfolk County, England, who landed in New 
Haven, Conn., October 21, 1640. He subsequently received from Governor Dougan, 
under James H., a grant of 40,000 acres of land lying between Southampton and 
Montauk Point. The obituary notice of William, son of Peter, the founder of the 
Southold Colony, who died September 30, 1'684, and is so recorded, is spelled 
Holyoake. 

Through his mother he is descended from Rev. Thomas Mayhew, Governor 
of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, under a grant from Lord Sterling in 1614. 
Of their descendants, one branch became Quakers, and to this Fitz Greene Halleck, 
the poet belonged; others comprised among their numbers eminent fighting men, 
distinguished in the American revolution and since, both on land and sea. During 
the revolution Joseph Hallock fell as commander of a privateer; William Halleck 
commanded packet boats on Long Island Sound ; another William Hallock owned 
and commanded a vessel sunk by the English ship Snow, and had two sons, 
Jeremiah and Moses, who were also soldiers of the revolution. During the Civil 
War many members of the family fought in support of the Union, notably Major- 
General Henry W. Halleck. 

A portion of Charles Hallock's life was passed on his uncle's farm, at Plain- 
held, in a wilderness section of the Green Mountains in Massachusetts, where he 
imbibed those tastes for outdoor sports and adventure which so largely shaped his 
course through life. In those youthful days he occupied a secluded shooting box 
on the estate in preference to the farm house, except in coldest winter weather. 

Having fitted for college at Hopkins Grammar School, in New Haven, Conn., 
he entered Yale in 1850, but subsequently went to Amherst, where, in 185'2, during 
his sophomore year, he printed a college paper named the Scorpion. This seems to 
have been his first journalistic venture, and the taste for newspaper work then 
imbibed, or more probably inherited from his father, who was at that time the 
active head of the New York Journal of Commerce, induced him to discontinue his 
collegiate course of study early in the junior year and enter the printing office of 
his father. There he mastered the rudiments of a journalistic education. Although 
not a college graduate, the faculty of Amherst subsequently conferred upon him, 
in 1871, the degree of A. B. Extraordinary, the first honor of the kind which it had 
conferred. In the spring of 1855 he attached himself to the New Haven Register, 
and conducted that paper for a year and a half for its proprietor, M. A. Osborn, 
Esq., then collector of the port. In August, 1856, he accepted a salary and one- 
sixteenth proprietary interest in the Journal of Commerce, and remained until 
September, 1861, when the political troubles threw him out of his chair, but not of 
his ownership in the paper, which at that time had increased to about one-tenth. 



2 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

During these nine years of his editorial life Mr. Hallock did not confine himself 
to office duties. He was constantly on the move, taking trips of several months' 
duration at sundry times — first to the Rocky Mountains (a different journey then 
than now), then to the Red River country in British North America, next to Labra- 
dor, in 1860, when he headed an expedition to view the total eclipse and collect birds 
for the Smithsonian Institution, in connection with Elliott Coues, and at other times 
to Newfoundland, Cape Breton, and remote parts of Canada, accounts of which 
trips appeared from time to time in Harper's Magazine, illustrated by his own 
pencil, and which of course earned for him the right to be classed with the magazine 
writers of the period. Of those contributions of his which are annonated in the 
Harper index, we find : "The Siege of Fort Atkinson (a story of Indian strategy 
on the plains), "The Red River Trail," "Life Among the Loggers," "Aroostook and 
the Madawaska," "Three Months in Labrador," "Wild Cattle Hunting on Green 
Island," "The Racket Club," and "Secrets of Sable Island." He also wrote numer- 
ous novelettes for the weeklies and a series of western border sketches for the 
Spirit of the Times over the signature of "Lariat," exhibiting no especial mark of 
genius, perhaps, but sufficiently creditable for a young man of his age. 

During a period of the war, in Ii8i63, Mr. Hallock edited the Augusta (Ga.) 
Chronicle and Sentinel, in conjunction with N. B. Morse, Esq., afterwards of the 
New York Daily News, running the blockade overland into the Confederacy, and 
out again from Wilmington, N. C, to Bermuda by steamer, a graphic account of 
the trip and of the Enchanted Isles, afterward appearing in the Galaxy Magazine. 
While in the south he published a biographical sketch of General Stonewall Jackson, 
fifty-eight pages octavo, issued eighteen days after his death, which was afterward 
printed in Nova Scotia, in the fall of the same year, both editions aggregating 
10,000 copies. At Bermuda Mr. Hallock edited the Royal Gazette for several weeks 
at the request of the queen's printer, Donald McFee Lee, Esq., who was prostrated 
with fever. Then he took steamer to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and resided in that province 
and New Brunswick some three years or more, contributing to the papers there, 
and editing at different times the St. John Courier, the Telegraph and the Humorist, 
the latter a small weekly satirical journal which he started in St. John. The 
Courier was the confederation organ of the Province of New Brunswick, and 
contributed much to the consummation of the Dominion, being prompted by Sir 
Samuel L. Tiley, Peter Mitchell., R. D. Wilmot, Esq., and other leading politicians 
who wrote for it. The Humorist, edited coincidentally by Mr. Hallock, and printed 
in the Courier office, was anti-confederation in politics. The year previously he 
had published in the Halifax Citizen a series of thirty-seven politico-satirical papers 
entitled "Joel Penman's Observations ; or, the Provinces Through Yankee Spec- 
tacles," a very successful brochure, whose perspicacity subsequent events have almost 
verified to the letter, not only as respects political changes, but internal improve- 
ments and commercial relations. 

That Mr. Hallock has capacity for other avocations than journalism is indicated 
by the fact that he established the first exchange and money office in New Bruns- 
wick, subsequently extending the business to Halifax, through a branch office, where 
he also became one-fourth owner in the shipping house of Wilkinson, Wood & Co.* 
It was his accidental residence in Canada that has enabled him to gain much general 
information which he was able to turn to such good account in his books and in 
the Forest and Stream. 



RECORD OF A BUSY LIFE. 3 

In 1891 the leading citizens of Northampton, Mass., headed by the mayor. 
Editor C. M. Gere, Dr. J. M. Fay, et al., gave him a public dinner, at which thirty 
plates were laid, each course illustrating titles of books on natural history and 
sport of which he was the author. 

In June, 1866, Mr. Hallock's success in business, which was very considerable, 
coupled with his income from his interest in the Journal of Commerce, which he 
still held, and a one-fourth share of the large estate left by his father, who died a 
few months previous, induced him to give up business altogether, and he returned 
to Brooklyn, N. Y., after five years' absence, and purchased an attractive residence 
on Gates avenue. He then devoted his time to traveling and literary labor, appro- 
priating several months in each year to visiting remote regions. For one year, 
during 1808, he was the financial editor of Harper's Weekly. In February, 1878, 
he became an incorporator and director of the Flushing and Queen's County Bank, 
New York, of which he was a large stockholder. In the spring of 18l73 he printed 
his "Fishing Tourist," a work that has been much commended for its scope and 
accuracy, it being a complete guide to the principal salmon and trout districts of the 
United States and Canada. In August of the same year he commenced the publica- 
tion of a sportsmen's weekly periodical known as the Forest and Stream, a 24-page 
journal, now widely circulated in all parts of the world. The object of this publica- 
tion, as announced, was "to inculcate in men and women a love for natural objects, 
and to cultivate a high moral tone in this department of literature." The result, it 
is needless to state, has been fully and worthily accomplished, and the founder of 
the paper finds his due of praise in thousands of homes where it is read every week. 
Few persons have a larger or more extended acquaintance among civilians and army 
and naval officers than Mr. Hallock had. Of war vessel salt water acquaintances 
he names one hundred and forty. St. Retao, for one, took him to Anticosti, of the 
St. Lawrence. 

As the compliment in a foreign paper (Die Jagdzeitung, of Eilenburg, Prussia) 
indicates, "Hallock's works as a writer entitle him to a world-wide fame ; but in 
America his services have been, in addition to all this, of a most substantial and 
business-like nature. He first formulated the general ideas on game protection, 
and pushed the same forward to the present excellent laws on that subject, a work 
of love that deserves the highest commendation, for it involved the difficult task of 
showing to a republican country the real difference between the aristocratic game 
laws of the olden times which were intended for the few grand land owners, and the 
modern game laws, which as a part of our civilization protect and breed game for the 
reasonable good of all the people." 

He was the prime mover and promoter of the International Association for the 
Protection of Game and Fish, comprising a membership of '2'50 of the leading sports- 
men, naturalists and fish culturists of the country, with representatives in every 
state and territory of the United States and every province of Canada. The design 
was to formulate a common law book for the whole of America; but the impracti- 
cability of the measure would seem to have been demonstrated in later years, as -no 
consummation has been reached. In testimony, however, of the appreciation of 
Mr. Hallock's endeavors, he has been elected honorary member of something like 
thirty-five sportsmen's clubs in various parts of the United States and Canada, 
besides some twenty additional historical societies, etc. 

Mr. Hallock was also one of the incorporators of the Blooming Grove Park 
Association, in 1871, of which he was president and Fayette S. Giles first secretary. 
This association owns 12,000 acres of territory in Pike County, Pa., which is appro- 



4 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

priated to the propagation of game and to hunting the same. It has 30iO members 
and a large clubhouse and many annexes and cottages. In 18175 Hallock took after 
bufifalo in the Indian Territory (Nation). 

In 1876 Mr. Hallock published his "Camp Life in Florida ;" in 1877, his notaible 
work, "The Sportsman Gazetteer,' 'a perfect compendium and book of instruction, 
which has run through seven editions, and received the encomiums of the press on 
both sides of the Atlantic; in 1678, "The American Club List and- Glossary;" in 
1880, "The Dog Fancier's Directory and Medical Guide ;" in 1'886, "Our New 
Alaska;" in 1890, "The Salmon Fisher," besides four volumes of a different class, 
including college and family genealogies. Besides book-making he has contributed 
constantly to the daily and weekly press in and out of New York, gathered from 
commercial, mining and railway sources, by whose influence he had worked. Occa- 
sionally he has dipped into poetry, having written some fair poems, humorous and 
sentimental, quite a few of which have been printed as far back as 1855. 

When in college Mr. Hallock was elected a member of the D. K. E. Fraternity, 
and has since filled the honorary positions of secretary and vice-president of the 
New York and Washington (D. C.) Alumni Associations. He has held no public 
offices. 

In January, 1880, he sold his interest in the Forest and Stream to Dr. George 
Bird Grinnell, a nephew of Hon. Levi P. Morton, and retired from its management, 
greatly to the regret of his constituency. In April following, however, he was 
induced to accept a one-fourth interest in the Sea World and Fishing Gazette, a 
weekly journal devoted to angling and the commercial fisheries, published in New 
York, but his business interests in the far west prevented his devoting much atten- 
tion to it, and he may be said to have then practically abandoned the field of active 
journalistic labor. 

One of the most signal projects which he has yet undertaken was instituted in 
1ST9. It was the establishment of a Farm Colony for Sportsmen, in the extreme 
northwestern county of Minnesota, adjoining the Manitoba line. There, in the midst 
of the finest game and grain-producing region in America, he gathered around him 
many old friends of the rod and gun, and erected a large hotel at a cost of $12,000, 
which he hoped would become a stated resort for sportsmen during the summer 
and autumn seasons. His location was on the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba 
Railroad, and was called Hallock. It is the county seat of a rapidly developing 
section. He attempted to place the enterprise in the hands of a stock company 
because Jim Hill had frozen his tourists out. His scherrie included a sylvan park 
of primitive forest, beautified by a winding river, where sportsmen might locate 
summer cottages and escape from periodical' heated terms, but it failed. Carnegie 
would not assist. In 1892, Christmas night, the hotel burned up without insurance. 

Altogether Mr. Hallock's roving life, tastes and habits of close observation have 
especially qualified him for just such duties as he has thus far imposed upon him- 
self ; and although desultory and erratic, they have not been without benefits and 
usefulness to mankind. On one of his long vacations he attached himself for seven 
weeks to a squad of mounted revenue police, under Major Wagner, operating in 
the mountains of the Blue Ridge, to suppress the manufacture of illicit whisky, and 
a sketch of his adventure, as well as of the contraband traffic, together with valuable 
statistical information, was printed in the New York Herald in March, 1878. 

One peculiarity of the Hallock family is its longevity, which is possibly scarcely 
exceeded. In 1877 this was referred to by the New York Times, and in December, 
1870, the Brooklyn Eagle printed a list of fifty-four Hallocks whose average ages 



RECORD OF A BUSY LIFE. 5 

were 82iJ^ years, and of this number twelve were upwards of 90 years — one, the 
grandfather of Major-General Henry Wagner Halleck, having reached the extreme 
age of 103 years. At the later date of January, 1911, twenty are reported to 
be living above 95. 

Charles Hallock's grandfather was Rev. Moses Hallock, of Plainfield, Mass., 
and his great uncle, the Hon. Jeremiah Hallock, of Steubenville, Ohio. His grand- 
father, Moses, while he had pastoral charge of the church in Plainfield, Mass., 
taught a classical school in which 304 students were fitted for college. His father, 
Gerard Hallock, a graduate of Williams College, broke ground for the founding of 
Amherst College while principal of the Amherst Academy. 

Charles Hallock was married in New York on September 10, 1855, and had sons 
born in li8S6, 1860 and 1861, all of whom are dead. His wife's two Wardell uncles 
founded the I. O. O. F. (Odd Fellows^ in 1819. 

In 1900 Prof. Elliott Coues, of the Smithsonian Institution, wrote : "Charles 
Hallock, A. M., while not strictly a scientist, has been a member of one or more of 
the scientific societies of Washington since their organization, and has filled a unique 
and useful position for fifty years as a close observer and discriminating collector 
in the field of natural history. Prof. G. Brown Goode, of the National Museum, 
once wrote : 'No man can help us like Charles Hallock.' No geographical division 
of North America, marginal or intermediate, from the subarctic regions of Alaska 
and Labrador to the Carribbean Seas, has escaped his attention, while his sketches 
of travel which have appeared in the magazines and leading journals of the United 
States and Canada, together with the Forest and Stream, which he established in 
1878, and his numerous books, have given him an enviable prominence among 
tourists, sportsmen and savants, not often acquired by specialists of his ilk. His 
'Fishing Tourist,' published by the Harpers in 187'3, was the record of twenty-five 
years of wandering through the wilderness areas of the United States and British 
provinces, and as long ago as 1878, George Dawson, the eminent editor of the Albany 
Journal, and himself an angler of renown, wrote : 'Charles Hallock has written 
more and more wisely than any of his contemporaries.' 

"As an ichithologist, Mr. Hallock led the van up to the date of his 'Sportsmen's 
Gazetteer,' a 900-page volume, which appeared in 1877, that portion of it which 
treated of the edible game fishes of America, their synonyms and classification, 
being in advance of all other works, and was so quoted by Prof. Theo. Gill, who 
assisted the author very materially in his description of the Pacific coast fishes therein 
enumerated. 

"The Florida peninsula had early engaged Mr. Hallock's attention, and in 
1874-5 he fitted out the Ober and Al Fresco (Dr. C. J. Kenworthy) expeditions 
to the Seminole country and the west coast, and when his 'Camp Life in Florida' 
appeared, in 1876, the citizens of Florida privately, and through the press and public 
meetings, acknowledged to the author his substantial services rendered to the state, 
so little had been previously written of its geography and resources. In the same 
way Mr. Hallock received the thanks of Minnesota in 1858 for his services to that 
state. And in 1859 he opened up the Aroostook forest region of Maine to agricul- 
ture, through a summer of investigation, and a series of letters to the New York 
Journal of Commerce, of which he was then junior editor. The summer of 1860 
was devoted to an exploration of Labrador, in company with myself, and from 1863 
to 1866 to the Maritime provinces, including Sable Island, the Magdalens and 
Anticosti. Mr. Hallock was one of the pioneer prospectors among the Ontario 
gold fields. The net objective results of these and many other similar adventures 



6 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

appear in the Hallock collection, aggregating a value of several thousand dollars, 
which he donated to the Long Island Historical Society, of Brooklyn, in 1883. In 
1885 Mr. Hallock went out to Alaska and wrote up its resources and commercial 
possibilities in a work entitled, 'Our New Alaska,' with the subtitle of 'The Seward 
Purchase Vindicated,' every word of which has proved intelligently prophetic and 
true. 

"Not to be prolix in review of a most interesting life history, it may be said 
that four signal achievements of note accentuate Mr. Hallock's record. First, the 
Forest and Stream, which has had the effect to elevate the tone and status of sport, 
to disparage whatever was evil in popular pastimes, and to make the new woman 
possible. Second, his scheme to secure co-operative legislation for the protection 
of game, and to formulate a code of laws based upon the distribution of species, 
and uniform, as far as practicable, in their application to areas having the same 
climate and fauna, success to be accomplished through the agency of an international 
association for the protection of game, which he organized in 1874. Third, the 
incorporation of the Blooming Grove Park Association, in 1871, Mr. Hallock being 
its first secretary, and a most active promoter of the finest existing game preserve on 
the continent. Fourth, the publication of the 'Sportsmen's Gazetteer,' which gave to 
the pupils he had trained a passe-partout to health, and a hanldhook by which they 
might stalk the continent of North America, and of which the London Field asserted 
that 'a more complete and comprehensive work had proibably never been published 
by any sportsman,' a gracious tribute bestowed in the face of the fact that its own 
chief editor, Mr. Walsh ('Stonehenge') had already published in England an 
'Encyclopedia of Rural Sports,' and other standard sporting books. 

"Briefly, if Mr. Hallock's claim to the gratitude and go'od will of American 
sportsmen rested solely upon his labors in behalf of the preservation and propaga- 
tion of game and fish, he would stand deservedly high in the estimation of those 
members of the guild who appreciate true sportsmanship, and believe in giving honor 
to whom honor is due. In line with this thought it should be mentioned that away 
up in the northwest corner of Minnesota, on the edge of what was once the great 
Roseau game region, there is a town of 1,200 people bearing his name (Hallock), 
which is the county seat of Kittson County, the most progressive municipality in the 
whole Red River Valley. He is the father of this town." 

The American Field, in 1888, printed the following, according to Dr. A. J. 
Woodcock, of Byron, 111. : "Probably there are few sportsmen who are known so 
widely by name, and so little by direct personal acquaintance, as Mr. Charles 
Hallock. His books and writings have given him prominence in the field of natural 
history and sport, and have always been accepted as authoritative in a certain 
sense, because he speaks only of what he has observed and experienced, not by 
hearsay." 

Although socially inclined, Mr. Hallock is more apt to be found in some remote 
and unvisited region than at the trap or butts. He is as nomadic as an Arab. 
Although interrupted by spasms of business activity and speculative venture, all the 
aims of his life seem to have been subordinated to a love of perpetual motion. Like 
the cork leg in the song, he is always wound up and going. 

Born in affluence, with abundant opportunity for travel, Mr. Hallock has 
extended his wanderings with rod and gun to nearly every geographical division of 
the continent. Many of his explorations have 'been by canoe and saddle, in advance 
of settlement and wagon roads. Since 1880 Mr. Hallock has been occupied to some 
extent with real estate operations in Minnesota, although his winters are spent in 



RECORD OF A BUSY LIFE. 1 

Washington, at the National Capitol, in close communion with the Smithsonian 
Institution and kindred societies, three of which include him as an active member. 

He is as good an all-around editor as he is sportsman. In 1866 Kendall, of the 
New Orleans Picayune, invited him to that paper at a salary of five thousand 
dollars. Kendall said he wanted a man "who could jump in anywhere." 

Referring to Charles Hallock's descriptive powers as a writer, no tribute could 
be more convincing than the following lines spontaneously addressed in the year IQOl 
to the author of "The Bison's Paradise," by Dr. Robert Bell, F. R. S., of the Canadian 
Geological Survey, who is probably the best authority in the world : "Your descrip- 
tion of Northern Minnesota would be hard to beat. To the mind of one who has 
seen it, as I have, and the same in the Red River Valley in Manitoba, it is a perfect 
picture, and makes you imagine you are there again. You can almost feel the wind 
waving the tall grass and hear the cries of the various kinds of birds. You must 
have a good knowledge of botany, as well as natural history, to be able to describe 
the flora of that region so accurately. The whole is a vivid picture of the Red River 
Valley as I saw it thirty-five years ago. And at the same time that it is so eloquently 
expressed it contains no mistakes." The article was published in the Minneapolis 
Journal first, and afterwards in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican. 

The following bill, one of the most unique ever rendered to civilized man, was 
presented to the state of Minnesota by Mr. Hallock to cover the installation expenses 
of his frontier exhibit at the New Orleans Cotton Exposition, in 1884-5 : 

New Oreans, La., November 10, 1684. 
To Samuel E. Adams, Treasurer State Board Collective Exhibits, Nezv Orleans 

Exposition: 
To— 
1 birch wigwam complete. 32 large and small photos of scenery, and 

1 Indian baby cradle. portraits. 

4 sets squaw frocks and shawls. 3 large maps of Minnesota and Mani- 

6 lay figures. toba, sundry properties. 

2 rush mats. 3 paddles. 

1 birch maple-sugar mokuk. 1 cedar torch. 
1' birch maple-sugar mould. 1 ball pitch. 

2 mokuks killikinnik. 1 bag seed rice. 

1 bundle red willow sticks. 3 sets shaganappi dog harness. 

1 old toboggan. 1 Red River cart. 

1 leather cariole. ^ "^ toque. 

1 J 2 sets shaganappi ox harness. 

1 good canoe. , . , 

. , , 1 pair snowshoes. 

1 old canoe. , 

1 fish s ear capote. 

^ ■ 1 pair beaded flannel leggings. 

1 ^^^"^ ^^'"- . 4 pair moccasins. 

4 dozen cat-tails. 2 £gj(. j^^j. 

1 dry hide. o „or'west sashes. 

2 pitch pine torches. 1 pair corduroys. 

3 Eskimo (huskies) dogs at $15 each. 2 store wigs. 

Paid for killing dogs, — 1 pair leather (buck) breeches. 

Taxidermist work on same. 1 bundle horsehair for 6 wigs. 

Received payment, Charles Hallock. 

(Mokuk is a bark basket without handle. Moulds are bark cornucopias, which 



8 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

are filled with melted maple sugar while inverted, and are carried by a buckskin 
thong, which is passed through the point of the cornucopia before it is filled, the 
end being knotted so that it will not slip through. When hard the sugar holds it 
immovably. Killikinnik is the inner bark of the red willow, which is mixed with 
tobacco for smoking. Shaganappi is untanned hide.) 

This exhibit was the primitive forerunner of the many better like shows which 
have been presented at sportsmen's expositions held in Boston, New York, Chicago 
and elsewhere during the subsequent twenty-five years. 

It is an interesting fact, attesting Mr. Hallock's mechanical ingenuity, versatility 
and general knowledge of backwoods craft and aboriginal belongings, gathered 
during his forty years' previous wanderings, that he set up this entire exhibit quite 
unaided, carpenter work and all. He set up his tepees, costumed his lay figures, 
painted their faces and wigged their heads, made his imitation snow and water 
for winter and summer seasons, laid out his wild rice paddock, fitted up his camp, 
posed his groups, rigged his dog teams, etc. One group represented squaws in 
canoe beating out wild rice in situ; another two Indians in canoe spearing fish. 
There was a home camp with squaws and papoose in standing cradle ; a Canadian 
traveling cariole with fur-clad occupant and driver behind on snowshoes ; a tepee 
with its furniture, fire and primitive cooking apparatus; a Red River cart from 
Northwestern Minnesota, peculiar to the fur trade half a century ago. Of the 
quality of this primitive exhibit, it may be remarked of the figures in the fishing 
canoe that they were so close to life that they engaged the discussion of a Mississippi 
"cracker" and his wife, who finally settled the question by prodding the spearman 
with the point of a cotton umbrella to see if the figure was real. As a droll 
sequence to this episode they afterward tested the living group of the dignified Gall, 
wife and son (who formed part of the Dakota exhibit), in the same way, with a 
recklessness which would have cost them their hair had the contretemps occurred 
on their native prairie a few years sooner. 

Associated with Mr. Hallock's exhibit was a reproduction of Minnehaha Falls 
in real water, about half size, by Prof. N. H. Winchell, of the Minnesota University. 
The whole was viewed with great interest, and elicited a full meed of praise from 
the newspapers of the period. 

The Dean of American Sportsmen. 

"Honor to whom honor is due" should be the motto of every American citizen, 
and it is gratifying to note that the devotees of gun and rod, especially those show- 
ing keenest interest in the literature of out-of-door sports, show proper appreciation 
of services rendered by that distinguished gentleman now recognized as the Dean 
of American sportsmen. A Washington correspondent, writing to the editor of the 
Sportsmen's Review on this subject, makes the following appreciative comments: 

"There is a well-preserved old gentleman, seventy-five or seventy-six years of 
age, who is frequently seen in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution at Wash- 
ington during the cooler months of the year, occasionally entering the offices of the 
various departments, and any one whose attention is attracted to his presence will 
observe that he is everywhere received with a familiar courtesy which betokens 
respect tempered with personal regard. Whenever he enters he seems to have a 
special errand, though he invariably deprecates intrusion upon busy men in busy 
hours. When his mission is accomplished in this or that department, and he moves 
to take leave, he is almost invariably escorted to the door by the chief of the bureau. 
The oldest officials seem to know him best, those of middle age are less demonstra- 



RECORD OF A BUSY LIFE. 9 

tive, though all recognize him as the dean of the Smithsonian, and he is generally so 
regarded. Indeed, the fact is historical that his connection with this institution dates 
as far back as the fall of ]8()0, at which time Prof. Spencer F. Baird, who was then 
chief fish commissioner of the United States, did him the honor to look him up at 
his residence in Brooklyn upon his return from his collection trip in Labrador in 
company with Prof. Elliott Coues, who at that time had just made his maiden trip 
in the interest of ornithology. 

"Ever since that time Mr. Hallock has been doing gratuitous service for such 
departments as his wide field experience would enable him to aid, more especially 
in zoology, geology, geography, ichthyology, entomology, biology, enthropology, 
forestry and agriculture, and also in the Indian office and weather bureau. At one 
time, when Professors Harkness and Eastman were in charge of the naval observa- 
tory, he was a frequent visitor there. 

"The other day, by request of Cyrus Adler, librarian of the Smithsonian, he 
opened out correspondence with Professors Henry and Baird, dating to 1807, and 
embodying transactions which will find permanent place in the comprehensive biog- 
raphies of those distinguished functionaries which are now being prepared under 
the personal direction of their daughters. Miss Lucy Baird and Miss Mary Henry. 
The chief of these papers related to the establishment of the Central Park Zoo in 
New York, and the installation of its first superintendent under the supervision of 
Andrew V. Green and Salem H. Wales, Mr. Hallock selecting the party. There 
was also a letter written by Marshall McDonald to Mr. Hallock in 1878, requesting 
his influence in establishing his fishway, which he had just perfected. This gentle- 
man afterward succeeded Professor Bird as fish commissioner. Mr. Hallock had 
that year started his popular weekly journal, which was at once employed as a 
medium of scientific communication by Dr. Theo. Gill, Elliott Coues, H. V. Hayden 
and other notables working under the auspices of the Smithsonian, many of whom, 
like General Brisbane, the two Schafields, Captain Bendire, Colonel Albert Mallory, 
and others, held high official rank in the army. 

"Mr. Hallock had many distinguished correspondents in Canada, such as Dr. 
Robert Bell, H. G. Vennor, William H. Venning, Moses Perley and other scientists. 
He had the unlimited confidence of them all, and this acquaintance throughout the 
continent — nearly all of which had been traversed by Mr. Hallock himself during 
the twenty-five years previous to 1873 — gave him a wide and powerful influence. 

"And this is the reason why this gentleman is honored in his declining years as 
he rambles through the grounds of the Smithsonian, which he has been so long 
familiar with. We is well preserved physically, has never had serious illness, and 
is likely to line up with his ancestors, who have been proverbially long lived. Mr. 
Hallock is a winter resident of Washington, but he passes his summers in North- 
western Massachusetts, near a little village named Plainfield, in the Hampshire Hills, 
where repose the relics of five generations, and where the brook trout bite freely 
in the spring. He is there at the present time." — Sportsmen''s Review. 



CHAPTER II. 



ANGLING DAYS AND ANGLING WRITERS. 



"As life runs on the road grows strange 
With faces new; and near the end 

The milestone into headstones change, 
Neath everyone a friend." 



Yes, it's up to me ! I have traveled wide, met many people, led a checkered 
life, and grown old ; and because I have passed- seven years beyond the Scripture 
limit of three-score and ten, and so survived the majority of globe-trotters who 
were contemporaries of my youth and young manhood, I have been deputed to act 
the role of "Old Mortality," and repeat his kindly ofifices by scraping off the 
moss which has overgrown their personal records and their memories. So here 
I am again, as the clown said when he tumbled into the ring; and in accordance 
with the stereotyped fashion of campfire narration, I will proceed to knock the 
ashes from my pipe and summon the res gestae of the departed from out of the 
nimbus which enfolds the brain. What will be mere gossip to the adolescents 
v-'ill be hard-pan reminiscence to the old and superannuated. 

And this "reminds me !" 

But first let me say a word for myself, how I .came to meet up with these 
sturdy and weatherbeaten men at arms, who, like Romulus and Remus, were 
suckled on the lupine milk of tough experiences; who have tracked the seques- 
tered parts of earth ; and followed the blazes through the woods and over the 
ledges; and the tide-rips over the seas. It will carry us back quite a little to those 
days when residents of New York City got all their water from wooden pumps 
at the street corners, when pigs rooted the gutters, and the night watch wore 
black leather capes and sou'westers in rainy weather, carried brass stars on their 
breasts, and called off the small hours with "All's well !" 

I was born a little above Canal street, about the time when it was crossed 
by a bridge, but I never fished the Collect Pond, where the "Tombs" stand now, 
nor shot snipe on the Lispenard Meadows, but my nurse used to wheel me along 
the footpath that meandered diagonally across the Washington Parade Ground 
to Sixth avenue and Thirteenth street, and I grew apace on the prosperity which 
preceded the great fire of 1835 and the panic of 1837. 

With the rake-off from that period of inflation, my thrifty father built him 
a replica of Kenilworth Castle, with tower and battlements and retaining wall 
on a bluff by the seaside at New Haven, Conn.,, and there I was nurtured and 
grew to my teens ; clams at low water and ducks at high tide, dapping in the 
full of the moon along the sedge where the incoming waves lapped the mussel- 
beds which lined the curve of the beach. In that school of technology I learned 
to build a correct fire, and cook shell-fish on iron hoops, as practiced at Coney 
Island in the old days when it was only a waste of sand dunes and salt grass, 
and Gil Davis was "governor." What would the old man think of the trans- 
formation now? What would John I. Snedicor, who ran the Oceanic, and old 
man Wykoff say? Wykoff had the only shanty on the island. There were conies 
in those days, and striped bass run up the Coney Creek. 

(10) 



ANGLING DAYS AND ANGLING WRITERS. 



11 



One learns his salt water lessons early who is reared beside the bright waves 
of Long Island Sound. Given a good centerboard lapstreak boat and imrestricted 
personal liberty, in ofif hours of boyhood, and there is no better kindergarten for 
the angler than its broad expanse and the tideways of its indented shores; and 
inasmuch as the greater part of my tuition was acquired at Brooks & Thatcher's 
boathouse with the hopeful son of the senior partner as my inseparable com- 
panion — unless I chanced to take up with Charles F. Hotchkiss or George H. 
Townsend, of East Haven, who were much older men— we two, John and I, soon 
learned the caprices of that changeful Mediterranean and all its belongings, and 
how to shape the "Teazer's" course accordingly. And John is living yet — at 
Minnetonka. We knew every rock, ledge and reef, and every spit, spar-buoy and 
spindle from Charles Island to New London. 

We made the acquaintance of the light-keepers at Marvin's Point and Faulk- 
ner's Island, and were solid with the hotel-keepers at Branford Point, Double 
Beach, Stony Creek, Thimble Islands, and Savin Rock, Sam Upson, Malachi 




IIAI.I.OCK CASTLE. 



King, and the rest. Once on a July day we made for the land in time to avoid 
a thunder squall which was coming up in a threatening manner. There were 
quite a few sailing craft in the ofifing. Being less prudent than we, several were 
capsized, and the "Teazer" ran out snd picked three men, who were strangers, 
off the bottom of a yacht that had turned turtle. Some fifteen years afterwards 
I happened to be in Savannah, Ga., and was telling the incident to Fred Sims, 
of the Morning News, when he exclaimed, "I was one of those three men !" 

Charles F. Hotchkiss was a forty-niner, and I saw him start that year in 
the brig, Gen. Armstrong, from the end of The Pier at New Haven, for the long 
voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco. There he set up in a tent one of 
the hob-nailed iron safes used in those days, and that was the first bank of de- 
posit in California. George Townsend was a man of wealth and owned a fine 
yacht. Brooks & Thatcher built for the Undine Club of Yale College, in 1851, 



12 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

the first college racing boat in this country. Everybody who has been to Minne- 
tonka Lake, in Minnesota, within the past twenty-five years, knows of Capt. 
Brooks, a quaint man of rare intelligence, of the Walt Whitman type, with 
flaxen hair which even now hangs in wavy yellow masses over his shoulders. 
That's my mate of the callow days, now in his eightieth year ! He went to col- 
lege, went to sea, went to ranching in Texas, went to Africa and the South Sea 
Islands, and came back tatooed from head to foot; an ivy wreath of India ink 
around his neck, a grapevine twined around one leg and a black snake around 
the other; coats-of-arms on his breasts; female figures on his back where he 
cannot see them; devices on his arms, and only his face clear of sepia. Crowds 
used to gather at the lakeside to see him give swimming lessons to both sexes 
and admire his epidermic embroidery, for he wore merely a "trunk"' on the 
occasion. 

There was good quail and rabbit shooting in the hills around New Haven 
in the forties, and I managed to put up a good many birds without a dog. At 
ten years of age I potted three quail out of a covey in a ryefield near my father's 
house on Oyster Point. This was my maiden shot. Ike Bush was an occasional 
companion. We had been hunting back of East Rock one day without starting 
a feather, when just before we reached the brow of the clifif, I raised my hand 
in admiration of the marvelous harbor panorama in front, when a bevy of twenty 
or more birds whirred up from under our very feet ! Ike went into ecstasies 
over the scenery, and I collapsed. He went into business at Norfolk, Va., before 
the war, served gallantly for four years in the Confederate army, and died in 
Suffolk four years ago at the age of seventy-three. 

During those boyhood years we attended Uncle Amos Smith's school, near by 
a dingle where there was a noble hardback grove, and a clear spring with water- 
cresses and frogs. It fed a salt water creek, where we dipped killies for fish- 
bait; and there we used to run bogs in the summer and ice cakes in winter 
after a tidal overflow, becoming so expert as seldom to make a misstep. This 
practice made us quick of eye and light of foot, and proved of great service in 
after years, especially in river work and handling canoes. On one occasion I 
remember in the Adirondack, in 1871, old Steve Turner, my guide (he was sixty 
years old then), broke an oar in the Bog River Rapids above Percefield Falls. 
The trout were among the rocks and we had been picking them out, though the 
current was too swift to save them all. The falls were just a litt?le below us 
and 28 feet high, and it would be a bad smash for the' boat, and something worse 
than wet feet for us, to go over. As the crippled boat swung around with the 
current and swept down stream near to a convenient flat rock. I stepped out 
lightly, grabbed the boat by the gunwale amidships, and held her until Uncle 
Steve could clamber out and make her fast. It was not a great trick to do, but 
let me tell you that a babe in the woods in the same pinch would have got rattled, 
missed the rock, and trouble would have followed. With a convenient gimlet and 
two yards of wire I had the oar spliced in a jifify, and we pulled up happily out of 
the drink. It was my habit always then and afterwards to carry a kit of small tools 
with me, which helped me and others less provident out of many a serious diffi- 
culty in camp or en voyage, wherever and everywhere about the continent. 

My youthful shooting proclivities gave my matter-of-fact father much trouble, 
but he was sensible enough to humor my bent. So I was taken out of school at 
twelve years of age and sent to my uncle's farm in the Hampshire hills of North- 
western Massachusetts for two years and a half, where I became initiated in 



ANGLING DAYS AND ANGLING WRITERS. 



13 



forestry and the ways of the woods, and learned the tricks and manners of farm 
animals. I could manage the horses and cows and sheep all right, because I 
gained their confidence. The same bay mare who slung my uncle across the 
stable with her teeth would let me tangle myself up with her legs and hoist 
with my back against her belly while I was grooming her ; and the "little cow" 
allowed me to shoot off my gun between her horns, standing in front of her, 
and not flinch. 

Later I was taken from Hopkins' Grammar School at New Haven and sent 
to Framington, Conn., where I could have a boat and gun and shoot muskrats 
on the overflows of the river. From Yale College, which was too artificial for 
my taste, I went to Amherst, where I could range Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Tom 
and pick up rocks and minerals for my cabinets. And so it went until I grad- 
uated, married, and went into business. I was of age. 




.SPK.VRIXG SALMON ON THE RESTIGOUCHE. 
Mr. Hallock fished for salmon on this river half a century ago. 



But these responsibilities hardly checked my vagabond proclivities. I com- 
menced to go west of the Mississippi early in the fifties, and there I first heard of Kit 
Carson, Fremont and Jesse, Pierre Choteau, Jim Beckworth, Jim Bridges, Bill Bent, 
and Charley Bent, his half-breed son. I read up Ruxton's "Life in the Far 
West" in 1846 and W. C. Prime's "Owl Creek Cabin Letters," and "Old House 
by the River," Lanman's "Wilds of America," and Rev. John Todd's "Long 
Lake" and Chas. W. Webber's "Romance of Natural History" (in Texas), 
and Col. Emory's Military Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth to San Diego, 
Cal., during the Mexican War. All these were contemporary writings, and it was 
not long before my old schoolday companion, Bob Stiles, and I came to be intro- 
duced to some of the real characters. Bob was the same Maj. Robert A. Stiles, of 
Richmond, Va., whose army reminiscences of the Confederate War, entitled "Four 
Years with Marse Robert" (Lee) were published in 1903, and who died two years 
later after a remarkable life of adventure and hair-breadth escapes. 



1.4 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Bob Stiles obtained leave for us to join Charley Bent's freighting outfit al 
Westport, Missouri (now Independence), on condition that we would obey orders 
and feed fair, because we were going through the Indian country, and some of 
the reds were bad. There were some seventy wagons in the train, and a per- 
sonnel of perhaps 120 men, of whom some forty were mounted as a horse guard — 
quite a formidable body. We were bound for Bent's Fort, on the upper Arkansas 
(now the town of Williams), and were not out many days before we met up 
with about 3,000 Comanches and Kiowas — men, women and children, who had 
been waiting for weeks at the Great Bend of the Arkansas River for annuities 
from a tardy Indian agent, and were a-heap mad. I wrote up the story of that 
lively adventure in the October issue of Harper's Magazine for 1857 ; so I need 
not amplify here, except to say that to the long category of "Indians I have 
met" we added the names of Yellow Bear, a friendly Arapaho, who was with 
the Bent outfit, and Chief Shaved Head, of the Comanches, who came near having 
his windpipe cut with a cheese knife in Bent's hands, when some of his mounted 
warriors came charging down on us too near to be pleasant. The old fellow, you 
see, had headed a charge of his warriors the day before, and his pony being 
tough-bitted, carried him into our lines without his consent. He proved a valuable 
hostage thereafter, and perhaps saved the day for us. Really, we had a running 
fight of skirmishing, tactics and maneuvers for twenty miles, which lasted 
four days. 

The experience, however, did not feaze me, and it was not many months 
before I was on the Red River Trail, in Northern Minnesota, with George F. 
Brott's party to open navigation between the headwaters of the Minnesota River 
and the Red River of the North. That was in 1858, the first year of statehood, 
and five' years before the famous Sioux massacre. This was many years before 
the "Fishing Tourist" (1873) and "Sportsman's Gazetteer" (1877) brought the 
angling literature of America to its climax, and was so attested by Baird, Gill 
and Jordan at the time. 

How comprehensive and aptly Mr. Roosevelt's history has been presented in 
bibliography may be ascertained by reference to the columns of the London Field 
(three papers) for June and July, 1887, under the title of "Angling Literature 
of America," above given. The compiler, in his review of the period indicated, 
submits to reviewers that "nothing like a comprehensive manual of angling was 
published until 1864, when Thad. Norris' 'American Angler's Book' and Robert 
B. Roosevelt's 'Game Fish of the North' both came out." 

That was during the year of the first lease of a Canadian salmon river, the 
Nepisiguit. Roosevelt's book made especial reference to that famous stream in 
its chapter on salmon fishing, itself a new revelation to the fraternity of fisher- 
men. How to fish for salmon, the implements to be used, and a description of 
the sport, had never been presented before. The volume was a godsend to anglers, 
for it included the technology of angling, fly-fishing, tackle-making, entomology, 
fish culture, camping out, etc. It described new devices, new methods, and new- 
fields of sport which had come into the purview during the sixteen years that 
had intervened since the enterprising J. J. Brown had prepared his "American 
Anglers' Guide" (1849). Moreover, it introduced to notice new species of fishes 
not previously regarded for sport and identified others which had been in doubt. 
The whole subject was in chaos at that time, scientifically considered. Experts 
had not even quite determined whether a brook trout and a samlet (parr) were 



ANGLING DAYS AND ANGLING WRITI^RS. 



15 



the same, or that brook trout were not in fact immature sahuon. The scientific 
world has moved since them. 

In 1865, the year following his first production, Mr. Roosevelt put out a 
supplementary book, entitled "Superior Fishing," relating chiefly to the fishes of 
the Great Lakes. These two books, as well as my ''Fishing Tourist" and Prime's 
"I Go a-Fishing" (1873) were all published by the Harper Brothers. 

Not only must Mr. Roosevelt be recognized as a well-informed author of 
undoubted accuracy and reliability, but he was foremost with Agassiz, Baird, 
Theodatus Garlick, Ainsworth, Samuels, Prime. Matlier. Sage, Seth Green, Slack, 
Krider, Norris, Royal Phelps, and other ichthyologists in the promotion of fish 
culture and preservation of fish. He was for many years, and up to the time 
of his death, president of the New York City Association for the Preservation of 
Game and Fish, and wrote many articles on angling and kindred subjects in tho 




MT. KATAHDIN FROM NEAR ABOL CARRY, 

Visited bv Mr. C'h.irU-s llallock in 1859. 



Citizen, which he published in 1856-57. Verily, he is entitled to a leading place in 
history, and let the fraternity of anglers freely accord it. Honor to whom 
honor is due. 

As to Norris : Forty-six years have passed since the first edition of Uncle 
Thad. Norris' remarkable book appeared, and of all the cognate emanations which 
have subsequently been written, few have been able to add or subtract anything 
to materially affect the integrity of the work or make themselves of better worth. 
I am making no reference, of course, to the transcendent works of the purely 
scientific field, in which the scale system, the lateral line, and the hyoid bone play 
so important a part. The "American Angler's Book" is today by long odds the 
best home book extant upon the broad subjects of which it treats, and this con- 
ceded precedence is made obvious by the fact that it is still in print, and that 



16 



AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 



edition, after edition has been consecutively made profitable to the publisher. It 
is purely an American book for American anglers. There is no "English" in it. 
There is as much difference between the habitats and habits of the fishes of the 
two continents as there should be between the methods and appliances of fishing 
for the same, and the angler who would substitute one for the other would be 
as likely, if he were a shooter, to hunt for jacksnipe with a rifle in a chapparal. 
The field of indigenous angling literature was fallow when Norris entered it. 
Lanman, Herbert and Bethune had worked the ground over, and so had Harry 






DOMINE OLMSTEAD, 
Grammar School, New Haven, 1847 



MR. CHAS. F. HOTCHKISS, 
A New Haven Forty-niner. 



Venning, a Canadian, now in his eigthy-eighth year, who wrote with a masterful 
pen of the haunts of trout, salmon and land-locked salmon years before. Lan- 
rnan's volumes, entitled "The Wilds of North America," which covered almost 
the entire surveyed domain of this continent, and much that was primeval, were 
printed in 1845'; but to the youth of this country his utterances were as dead 
languages then, and never so much prized as now, when long time out of print. 
Norris' book came opportunely, and it has continued opportune ever since. Latter- 
day aspirants have written books of positive merit, Louis Rhead in lead, but 
the ichthyologists have very properly, doubtless, first read up Thad. Norris. In 
order to do full justice to his subject he would hardly be wise to modify or change. 



CHAPTER III. 

FISHIXG J.XrXTS AXn AXr.r.IXG associatks. 

My preceding chapter, opening this memoir, is not so much a record of my 
personal rambles about wild regions and unsettled tracts during the middle of 
the past century, as a recollection of sportsmen of an older generation than I 
whom I chanced to meet up with from year to year. Reminiscences tossed out 
at random bring me up to 1859, when I cast my first salmon fly in the deep pool 
below Aroostook Falls, in Maine ; and the rod and reel I used there is now 
among the relics of the "Tuna Club" at Catalina Island, in California, where the 
chief of all live sea anglers. Prof. Charles F. Holder, is its president. It was 
bought at Conroy's, in New York, opposite the Pritchard Brothers tackle shop, 
in Fulton street, in 1858. That summer I took in the Grand Stream Lakes, where 
Dr. George W. Bethune had his camp at the outlet, with a big party from Houlton, 
and afterwards fished at St. Croix River and Sebago Lake for landlocked salmon ; 
visited Fort Fairfield, of the historic Aroostook War, Fort Kent, and the French 
settlement along the Madawaska for sixty miles to St. John River. In 1860 I 
went to Labrador with Prof. Elliott Cones, F. S. Knowlton and George Lunt, of 
Washington Smithsonian ; caught sea trout and river trout all the way up the 
coast from Belle Isle Strait to the Eskimo Bay, latitude 55°, and to the Rigolet 
Post, where salmon were plenty and were netted by the Eskimos for the Hudson 
Bay Company. 

A broad vista opens wide during the lull before the war, about the year 
1860, fairly crowded with the names of great men who fished (not great because 
they fished!) ; and their deeds — are they not written in many books of chronicles? 

During the Civil War rifles took the place of shotguns, and slaughter in' the 
field at large was done to order. Meanwhile sporting papers of the day were 
!-uspended, with the single exception of Porter's (Wilkes') Spirit of the Times. 
After reserving the first three years to the struggle for the Union, I applied the 
next three years to a complete tour of the Maritime Provinces of Canada, Prince 
Edward Island, Cape Breton and Quebec to a collection of trophies of all varieties 
of fauna for the museums from numerous wilds and streams, the results c?f 
which endeavor appeared duly in my "Fishing Tourist," which was printed by 
Robert Rutter in 1872 and issued in the following spring. This diligent old gentle- 
man is alive still, and working uptown in New York at the age of eighty 
years plus. 

The dilettante gunning class, with their hunting dogs, had not yet come into 
view, because the era of deadly machine guns had not arrived, and gentlemen 
who hunted them were just anglers, who went to secluded waters, and shot birds 
and animals only for the camp. Had I the gifted pen of Levant F. Brown, who 
finds beauty in every wild, and makes the woods and waters fairly gleam in his 
descriptions, eloquent with poetry and song, so that even the birds break out 
responsively to his call, I would braid laurels and eglantine for the heroes whom 
it is my privilege to name as sportsmen, and whom I have personally known 
during that period of my lifetime which I am about to survey. Men like Lanman, 
Thoreau, Burroughs, Venning, W. M. Brackett, E. A. Samuels, William C. Prime, 

(17) 



18 



AN ANGLER'S RE.AI1N[SCENCES. 



Reverend John Todd, and a host innumerable, are in the ranks, all aged and 
venerable; and who of them all shall take precedence? Brackett and Venning still 
live at eighty-seven and eighty-eight years, respectively, and John Burroughs 
venerable. 

Reminiscences crovi^d up before me in wind-rows, like the ripening leaves 
of autumn, or the rubescent clouds of sunset. Brown himself is one of the 
most charming sportsmen, because he is such a nature worshiper. Ardent, and 
still not young (indeed, he is what some youthful sportsmen would call an old 
man), he could make the dreariest camp environment cheerful with firelight and 
a genial presence when the weather failed to brighten. Taxonomically he belongs 
to the guild of camera-hunters, like the still more famous George Shiras, 3d, 
who hunts the forests for nature study rather than for slaughter. I think that 
neither of these men aspire to be classed with the mighty nimrods of the age, 






MR. WALTER M. BRACKETT, 
Venerable Angler. 



MR. COLIX CAMPBELL. 
- P"amotis Angler and Hunter. 



though I reckon their larders are kept well supplied with the game of the 
country. The litter of fish-bones and feathers around their campgrounds attests 
to the truth of this surmise. And there are others. H. W. Herbert, better known 
as "Frank Forester" ; Genio C. Scott, a noted angler, and writer for Porter's 
"Spirit of the Times" ; old man Durivage, the author, who lived to be eighty-odd 
(all of them my acquaintances) ; J. V. Hayes, one of the first secretaries of the 
New York Sportsman's Club; Charles Astor Bristed ("Carl Benson"), who 
fell in love with "Dodo," author of "Kismet" and daughter of Rev. J. C. Fletcher; 
Charles H. Haswell, the engineer, of New York City, who died in harness two 
years ago in his ninety-ninth year; Charles G. Leland ("Hans Breitmann") ; 
Marriner A. Wilder, moose hunter; Sam Knox, son of Rev. John Knox, who 
tied my connubial knot in 1855, with Amelia J. Wardell ; Col. E. Z. C. Judson ("Ned 
Buntline") ; Aaron S. Vail, of Long Island; Stephen Massett ("Jeems Pipes); 



FISHING JAUNTS AND ANGLING ASSOCIATES. 



19 



Thomas A. Logan ("Gloan") ; L. B. France ("Burgeois"), late of Denver; Hon. 
Robert B. Roosevelt, Aleck Shewan, and half a score more, of whom only Colonel 
James Gordon ("Pious Jeems"), Aleck Shewan, Hamilton Busbey and Chas. Banks 
remain alive. Banks was a member of the New York Sportsman's Club of 1858, 
two years before me, and is still an active worker in the reorganization of the New 
York Association for P. G. and F. We used to meet at the old Sinclair House, 
at 754 Broadway, which was torn down two years ago, where the president erst- 
while occupied a chair made of elkhorns which was presented by "Grizzly" 
Adams, a noted mountain man from the Great Divide, who was contemporary 
with Kit Carson, Lieutenant Ruxton, Jim Bridger, et al. P. T. Barnum and he 
fell together at the old museum opposite Saint Paul's Church, in New York. 
and startling exhibitions were given, to which Daniel and the lions were as 
nothing. 





COM. J. U. GREGORY. 
Celebrated Salmon Fisher. 



MR. W. F. WHIT CHER, 
Veteran Angler. 



Then there were Isaac McLellan, who used to do poems for the Journal of 
Commerce in the forties, when William C. Prime wrote fishing sketches for the 
same paper over the signature of "W.", and his cousin, Samuel C. Clarke ; Daniel 
Webster, their intimate hunting companion; George A. Boardman ; Spencer F. 
Baird ; George D. Lawrence, who donated a marvelous bird collection to the 
National Museum — all of them eminent naturalists and game seekers, whom I 
knew personally and often intimately — now gone the way of all the earth. 

And now I devote an extended biography to Com. J. U. Gregory, L S. O., 
whom we may name as the leader of sportsmen of the last half century. He 
is eighty years today, living out his honors in quiescence and hope of hereafter. 
He is a scion of English, French and New Yorker, the third son of Dr. S. 
Gregory, who married a French lady in Montreal, and after a time returned to 
Troy, N. Y., his native place, where J. U. Gregory was born and partly educated 



20 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

at the Poughkeepsie Collegiate School. The family returned to Canada when 
he was about twelve years of age. 

Forty-three years ago he was appointed the representative, at Quebec, of 
the Department of Marine and Fisheries of the Dominion of Canada. He has 
written many articles on fishing and shooting, and is the author of a book of 
travels in French, called "En Racontant." He has been several times appointed 
a commissioner by the government, to inquire and report on the condition of the 
fishermen on the Labrador Coast, and into the causes of wrecks and casualties 
to the shipping. He has shot and fished over the coast of Labrador, below and 
above Quebec, and on two occasions in Florida. He was the founder of the 
Quebec Yacht Club, of which he is yet the honorary commodore, and also the 
founder and president for many years of the well-known Tourilli Fish and Game 
Club, Quebec. Mr. Gregory was one of the original stockholders and contrib- 
utors to the Forest and Stream magazine, founded by Mr. Charles Hallock. 

In his official capacity he has had much to do with the reception of royalty 
and other distinguished visitors to Canada, and has a fine collection of valuable 
souvenirs from the present Duke of Argyll and Princess Louise, Lords Dufferin, 
Lansdowne and Aberdeen, while governors of the country, also from the Duke 
of Connaught, and recently a very valuable souvenir from His Imperial High- 
ness, Prince Fushimi, of Japan, who landed in Quebec on his way to Japan from 
England. 

Mr. Gregory was amongst the first named by King Edward for a companion- 
ship of the Imperial Service Order, and received the badge and star which en- 
titles him to attach the letters I. S. O. after his name. King George IV is at 
the head of the Imperial Service Order. 

Mr. Gregory received a gold medal from the Commissioners of the Inter- 
national Fisheries Exhibition in London in 1883, and a large reward from the 
Canadian government for his services in connection with the preparation of the 
valuable exhibits sent from the province of Quebec. Mr. Gregory possesses a 
private collection of game birds, as well as sea birds, and also alligators, and 
other trophies of his expeditions in Florida, mostly shot and preserved by him- 
self as an amateur taxidermist. We first met and cast our salmon lines on Jacquet 
river in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1867. 

Going back no farther than forty-five years ago it is easy to remember that 
mine was almost the only salmon rod upon the noble Restigouche, throughout its 
majestic length of sixty-miles of superlative fishing grounds, a very different state 
of things today, when its broad swims below the Metapedia confluence are 
freckled with canoes of guides to club memberships at $1,000 apiece! For two 
.successive years in 1865-6 I had it entirely to myself, barring one Captain Barnard 
of H. M. S. "Barracouta," a practice ship, then off the coast, whose guns were 
occupied in battering the romance out of the fantastic escarpments from Escuminac 
to Tracadigash on Bay Chaleur, — ranging chiefly from the Upsulquitch to old man 
Merrill's, from Maine and up to Chane's at the mouth of Tom-Kedgewick's and one 
delectable summer I made the acquaintance of John Mowat,.the river guardian at 
Dee Side. All was solitude between. Occasionally, as the years passed, a stray 
fod would find its way to the river from some distant region and Aleck Shewan, 
the pedagogue, got into the habit of coming down every season from Montreal and 
is still teaching and fishing at the age of 84; and so is Hubert R. Ives, of the 
Queens Iron foundry at 79. But there were no accommodations for kid-glove 
anglers above Dan Yeaser's hostelry, where he and "Black Aleck," of blessed 



FISHING JAUNTS AND ANGLING ASSOCIATES. 



21 



ruemory, whom I first met in St. John, in 1864, did the gustatory honors. Gifford 
Sanford, Alfred Craven and Neill Haversham, of Savannah, Ga., came there. I 
knew them all. The later anglers, when rod privileges of moderate charge began to 
be required by the government the leading aspirants of the day, of whom John W. 
Nicholson, Sheriff Harding, Ed. Spurr, Harry Venning, were the chief, Jas. Laner- 
gun, the actor, Fred Curtis, of Boston, George Jas. Chubb, of St. John, preferred 
the Miramichi on the Nipissiguit, as being easier of access. Molson, of Montreal, 
Allan Gilmoiir and John Manuel, of Ottawa, Ivers W. Adams, of Boston, and half 
a dozen residents of Quebec used to go to the Mosie or the 
Godbout, and an increasing guild began to select the tribu- 
taries all along the St. Lawrence ; Andrew Clerk, of New 
York, and his brother, the doctor, chose the Grund of the 
Gaspe peninsula. Walter Moody, Wyllys Russell, the hotel 
man, Farquhar Smith, Geo. M. Fairchild, all of Quebec, vis- 
ited the Jacques Cartier near by, a river which has since 
passed into dessuetude, but is likely to be rehabilitated under 
judicious handling. I have a list of scores of noted salmon 
anglers, but how can I name them all in a limited article? 
I knew the most of them; quite a number live yet. 

These inimitable wielders of the two-handed wand were 
a rare lot, and all live in the memory of survivors. To the 
younger fishermen they have passed into oblivion. My 
"Salmon F'isher," published in 1890, will describe the rushing rivers and placid 
pools as Nature made them. And there are other books of excellence rare. 

As a friend of fifty-odd years' acquaintance, I am convinced that the Hon. 
Robert B. Roosevelt, who so recently died, has not yet had full credit for the 




ALLAN r,ILMOL-K 




ALLAN GIL:\I0UR'S 1-TSHING CAMP. 



22 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

very important part he occupied in the American anglers' guild during his life- 
time, especially during the Civil War period, when the young men of the land, 
and old ones, too, were too much engaged on the battle-fields to spare time for 
sport, except it were to eke out an occasional deficient ration for the camps by 
whatever game and fish could be caught during temporary cessation of hostilities. 
Mr. Roosevelt, it seems to me, was the living intermediate who bridged the 
interval between "Frank Forester" and the writer (if you will allow my claim). 

It is worthy of note that the Indians were beginning to be troublesome 
already, but were not bad. I had already bought a share of Beldon & Young's 
addition to the city of Hastings, some twenty miles down the Mississippi 
River below St. Paul, and they annoyed us by peering through the windows when 
we were at meals. It was not much of a city, and St. Paul itself then had a 
population of only SjOOO. Only one railroad touched any part of the Mississippi 
river, and everything west of it was hostile. 

Gen. Henry H. Sibley, who used to write frontier sketches in those days for 
Porter's Spirit of the Times, over the signature of "Hal-a-Dakotah," was in com- 
mand at Fort Snelling, and that military post and a hay meadow which was 
mowed, the cavalry were the only signs of civilization on thai side, excepting the 
Indian village of Mendota, where the general made his headquarters in two 
stone buildings, which still stand. Franklin W. Steel, Tim Newson, Judge Isaac 
Atwaster, tutor of my youth, who died in Minneapolis at eighty-nine years, and Gen. 
C. C. Andrews, still living, and since then a general in the army and governor 
of the state, were the principal pioneers, and of course, A-1 sportsmen. 

There was no end to game in variety in those days, and fine fish, too, right 
in the river and lakes all around. It was an ideal country for sportsmen; and 
so, when our party of seven started up with a spike team in the direction of 
Pembina, 40O miles away, we felt we were footloose and in tall grass. But there 
was a good road all the way, beaten hard by the hundreds of carts which brought 
down furs every year from Fort Garry and the Selkirk settlement. But that 
storj' was written up at the time for Harper's Magazine by myself, and I will 
only add that when a small band of straggling Indians in the neighborhood of 
Sauk River, a hundred miles up, commenced to help themselves freely ,out of 
the cracker box in the tail of our wagon, when trotting along over the prairie. 
Aleck Kinkaid, the old pioneer who plotted the town of Alexandria the year 
before, crawled back from his seat in front and let the foremost redskin have 
it under the jowl with his fist. The blow doubled him up, and he fell limp; 
and all the other redskins, who were not used to that sort of tactics, cried 
"hough !" and dropped back. It was late in the afternoon and they incontinently 
went into camp half a mile down river. In the evening they came up and smoked 
with us. It was midsummer and the days were warm, and they dressed scantily;' 
but every man had his clout and blanket — only that and nothing more. As a rule, 
the Sioux traveled mounted, but these were a scouting party, who wanted to 
locate a band of Chippewas who were supposed to be in the vicinity of the Crow 
Wing. Agency. The hostiles got together not many weeks afterward, while I 
was there at the Agency, and I saw the head chief, HoIe-in-the-Day, drive out 
in a buggy over the prairie to the battlefield, where the Sioux got the worst of it. 

I went through a good bit of experience that summer ; struck a rainy spell 
and a freshet in the Sauk River in July; lost all our provisions and part of our 
camp stuff in attempting to cross a ford, swamped the wagon in eight feef of 
water, half drowned the horses, lived five days on raw salt pork and water- 



FISHING JAUNTS AND ANCiLING ASSOCIATES. 



2.S 



soaked crackers because we had no dry powdtr, nor matches, nor any fuel to 
cook with ; hadn't a dry stitch of clothing or bedding all that time, and didn't 
meet a living soul outside of mosquitoes. We got up as far as Fort Ripley in 
a bad plight, and the soldie'rs took us in and recruited us — but not for the army ! 
By the time I reached Chicago in the fall, going East, I was exploited as a great 
explorer and made guest of honor at John B. Drake's fourth annual game dinner, 
given at the Briggs House. This was in 1858. 

At that early date migrants' from the East had not begun to meet up with 
incomers from the W^est. The tide was still westward. Chicago was in embryo. 




FL.\TITE.\nS A.Xl) rRO.SPKCTc iK.-; .\T KALI Sl'KL, -MO.XIWNW, 



Her streets were higgledy-piggledy, three steps up and two down, here a rise and 
there a level. Grade had not been established ; and when I appeared in town in 
my soiled and weather-stained prairie costume, the townspeople who had never 
been any further West took me for a sort of Kit Carson, a Pathfinder, and the 
enterprising Mr. Drake presented me to his table guests en grande tenue, just as 
I was. Subsequently this genial landlord opened the Grand Pacific Hotel, and 
ran it for thirty years, keeping up the game dinners all tlie while until he died, 
and the hotel was replaced by a skyscraper. I happen to have kept the menu 
card of his twenty-first dinner, at whicli I was also present, and reproduce it 



24 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

here. It is interesting to sportsmen to show how abundant game was even 
then. It certainly ran the gamut: 

JOIJN B. DRAKE'S TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL DINNER. 

Chicago, 1875. 

MENU. 

Blue Points. Soup — V^enison, hunter style; game broth. Fish — Trout, black bass. Boiled — 

Leg of mountain sheep, ham of bear, venison tongue, buffalo tongue. Roast — Loin of buffalo, 

mountain sheep, wild goose, quail, redhead duck, jack rabbit, blacktail deer, coon, canvasback 

duck, English hare, bluewing teal, partridge, widgeon, brant, saddle of venison, pheasants, mallard 

duck, prairie chicken, wild turkey, spotted grouse, black bear, opossum, leg of elk, wood duck, 

sandhill crane, ruffed grouse, cinnamon bear. Broiled — Bluewing teal, jacksnipe, black birds, 

reed birds, partridge, pheasants, quail, butterball duck, English snipe, rice birds, redwing starling, 

marsh birds, plover, gray squirrel, buffalo steak, rabbits, venison s-teak. Entrees — Antelopd 

steak, rabbit braise, fillet of grouse, venison cutlet, ragout of bear, hunter style, oyster p5e. 

Salads — Shrimp, prairie chicken, celery. Ornamental Dishes — Pyramid of wild goose liver in 

jelly, pyramid of game, en Bellevue. Boned duck, au naturel. The coon out at night. Boned 

quqil, in plumage. Redwing starling on tree. Partridge in nest. Prairie chicken en socle. 

Among the guests was Long John Wentworth, who had been present at the 
first dinner, sixty-three years ago. 

I doubt if any such bill of fare was ever set up in any land at any period. 
The Canadian Camp of our time, in a notable attempt at renascence, made an 
extraordinary display of wild meats at its sumptuous dinner two years ago, and 
the confines of the earth were levied on; but the selection of viands was not 
after St. Peter's choice (Acts x, 11-14) as substitutes for game. The menu 
would have delighted the Indians at the Crow Agency, who are natural omni- 
phagists, and have a keen taste for miscellaneous comestibles. Chief Hole-in- 
the-Day, of whom I was speaking, himself had more style about him. He gave 
me his portrait, which is now in the gallery of the Minnesota Historical Society. 
He occupied a fairly good one-story house with four rooms, which sufficed to 
accommodate himself and his seven wives. Although conforming, to a certain 
extent, to civilized ways, he adhered tenaciously to his aboriginal costume and 
was more often seen in his flaming red blanket and fancy moccasins than in a 
dress shirt. When he gave an audience to visitors of consequence he donned 
a war bonnet of bald eagle plumes, and stretched himself out on a lounge in regal 
style ; each individual feather of said bonnet supposed to stand for an opponent 
killed in battle. 

Allan Morrison was agent at the time, and Paul Beaulieu, a French half- 
breed, was interpreter. Allan's elder brother, William Morrison, piloted Henry 
R. Schoolcraft to the headwaters of the Mississippi not many years before, and 
Schoolcraft was living at the time. I had a tilt with him in the Evening Post 
as to priority of discovery. But William had been trapping on Itasca feeders 
since 1808, before him. But official recognition of the headwaters were necessary 
for government acceptance, and Schoolcraft won. Beaulieu died eleven years ago 
at Leech Lake, at the age of seventy-seven years. He was a loyal servitor, and 
raised a full company of bucks and breeds in 1863 for service in the Civil War. 
These agency Indians as I saw them, were not fastidious as to diet. On one oc- 
casion they hauled a drowned horse out of the river, and fed on the meat with 
gusto for several days, as long as it lasted. And yet there was choice game in the 
woods, game on the open prairie, and catfish in the river! "De gustibus noii 
disputando." 



CHAPTER 1\'. 



EARLY RECOlJ-ECriOX S. 



Harking back to my younger days I pick up reminiscences occasionally from 
along the trails and thickets of my peregrinations which penetrated far into the 
unsettled wilderness of the United States and Canada — so little traversed then by 
railroads west of the Mississippi. Introduced names of defunct and disabled 
sportsmen I fancy are of no special interest to readers of the ■20th century, who 
prefer fresh memories which scintillate in the public eye, and besides my memory 
fails and my pen drags. However, I call up an occasional chance meeting 
from the retrospect, write it for auld lang syne, and kindle it anew around the 
smoldering campfire. On my old diary I have 2,500 names, dead and living, of 
whom a very large proportion contributed to Forest and Stream in the 70's — all 
subscribers, gun shooters, rod swingers and athletes of the baseball field. 

Thanks to my stars I I have had my surfeit of all the enjoyment to be had 
in the line of sport (fishing and shooting) in days past without money and without 
price; free to fish the choicest pools in noblest rivers and enjoying the companion- 
ship of my canoemen "for what there was in it," and that knowledge of human 
nature and human arts and wiles which we were able to draw from each other, 
ignoring caste and despising nothing, roaming the wilds with the freedom of life 
untrammeled by anxieties of business and apprehension of dynamite and bad men 
who break through and steal. And let me tell you that my enjoyment of the 
present passing days and hours is made up of the consolation of these memories of 
past experiences, with the hopes and promises of joys to come in the future 
happy hunting grounds. But what the books are made of nowadays are apt to be 
like the heroics of T. R., who has recently scoured the chapperals and jungles of 
what remains of the prehistoric wilds of Africa, where Baker, Livingston, Stanley 
and Paul du Chaillu put in their hunting grounds, whence Paul returned in the 
50's, bringing the head of a swinging club gorilla mightier than the talking 
anthropoids of Prof. Garnier of today. 

As the venerable Isaac McLellan, who died at 92 years of age in 1893, wrote 
with ecstasy, so write I now — albeit homophones — all words which sound alike 
but may have different meanings. So I quote : 

"Pleasant it is for a traveler after a long day's journey to pause at some 
elevated hilltop for rest and retrospection, and to take a comprehensive view of 
the route lately traversed. Far as eye may reach, even to the horizon's misty 
edge, he sees beneath him outspread like a map, each lovely spot he has visited. 
Far off in distant obscurity shines out the starting point of his career; and even so 
can one recall the scenes and events of his early time of youth. All these regions 
of resort still survive freshly in the memory of the veteran sportsman, even as the 
scenes of the traveler's adventure are present to his eye and mind as he surveys 
the features of the natural world, through which he has lately journeyed. Now 
brightly arc photographed in memory the names, forms and features of those old 
friends, who were the associates of the thoughtful sportsman and scholar in the 
years departed." 

He adds : "My earliest experience with the gun was in wild pigeon shooting, 

(2.5) 



26 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

more than fifty years since. Those beautiful birds were then very plentiful in 
New England and I have shot them within a few miles of Boston. They were 
then shot by the concealed .gunner as they collected on a tall pole, like the old- 
fashioned vyell-sweep. It was usual to bait with grain the ground beneath, and 
the flock would gather there for food, first alighting on the pole and then settling 
to the feast. This bird had great strength of wing. It was said to travel at the 
rate of a mile a minute and it required a good marksman to stop them." 

Following him closely in this recital of incidents, now extinct, my venerable 
kinsman, Nicholas Hallock, of Ulster county. New York, a lusty fox hunter now 
of M years of age, called my attention the other day, while we lunched together, 
to the sport he had among the wild passenger pigeons in the state of New York 
in the 40's, and I claimed to have had some gun practice at the same time ; for 
while I was fitting for Yale College at Hart's Classical School in Farmington, 
Conn., the principal kept my percussion cap gun in his study for occasional use 
on outings and holidays. I was the only scholar who had the privilege, and I 
frequently brought in a bag of pigeons, partridges and quail, which I was obliged 
to wade for by fording the canal up to my armpits ; and when the meadows were 
flooded in the spring old miller Holt's son and I shot muskrats galore from a 
pungy skifif. Thousands of the wild pigeons were shot constantly at the trap- 
shooting conventions of sportsmen from that mid-century date up to the 80's, or 
thereabouts. In those far back 40's the birds were carried in baskets for long 
distances on canal boats towed by six horses trotting against railroad time, which 
ran not much faster then. They were so roughly huddled together that they so 
seriously suffered from long confinement that twenty per cent of them died, and 
when the survivors were turned loose at the shooting line they were too tired to 
take wing, and so the starters would throw a baseball at them to make them 
rise. Such cruelty was insufferable among game and humanity and hosts of 
pigeons took flight for the West, making Wisconsin their chief nesting place and 
home. I remember taking a trip on one of these primeval canal boats on the 
Erie, which was fitted up comfortably with stateiooms for emigrants moving west. 

My cousin, Nicholas, resided in Queens county. Long Island, when the 
Hempstead Plains were crowded with "fur, fin and feathers." The scrub oaks 
afforded cover for deer, quail and foxes. Even today the midland woods and 
swamps are almost an undisturbed preserve for forty miles from North Islip to 
Riverhead, where I have hunted quail with the Wagstaff boys not far from 
B'abylon, sixty years ago, on their father's demesne. Both of the now old gentle- 
men are taking active lead of the New York Game and Fish Protection, and 
ex-Senator Alfred is its president. The South Side Club, with the far-famed 
actor, J. K. Hackett, president, was a favorite resort in the 60's, when John 
Stellenwerf was chef there before he took charge at Blooming Grove Park in the 
70's. Aaron Vail ran a high-class anglers' club at Nort Islip, near where the 
deer, foxes and rabbits took convenient cover. The terminus of the main railroad 
was just beyond at Farmingdale. Across countr}', on the south side, Austin Roe 
kept hotel for anglers, with his fine trout ponds at Patchogue. David Hartt held 
forth at Good Ground, not far away, where ducks dabbled, and down at Fire 
[sland, where Sammis was landlord, I spent one Fourth of July with the Benson 
boys on the Great South bay, and heard Joel Headley make his address in the 
evening. Then there were the Maitland, Minell, Massapequa and Maspeth trout 
ponds, owned by Wm. H. Furman, Wm. Floyd Jones, Shepard Knapp, Aug. 
Belmont and the tobacco Lorillards, all famous fishermien in those days gone, 




ISAAC McLELLAN, 
'the poet-sportsman." 



EARLY RFXOLLECTIONS. 27 

included in my reminiscences and now buried under ground — ponds and contents, 
fish and all, 

Those were great days, too, at Conk Vandewater's, on the South Oyster 
bay, where the two Judge -Bradys and I went sniping on the marshes, and where 
I met Fred Mather one day and carried him papoose back, Indian fashion, with 
a pitchfork trident over his shoulder, bearing seaweed representing Neptune 
rising from the sea. The Keiths had a marvelous sparkling trout stream, which 
ran through the woods, and employed a lusty pugilist to protect the property from 
poachers, who used silken nets as line as hair meshes and set them in darkest 
hours. And one night when I was at their shanty with Rev. Jos. L. Duryea, of 
Brooklyn, who had driven down the island with me in my wagon, we joined them to 
lie in wait for the trespassers. We had already discovered the seines, and laid 
by to watch them lift them out. Slyly thev proceeded, and cautiously, and the 
bouncers did the rest. 

Down at the east end of the island there are opossums in such numbers as 
to be a nuisance, and they are found nowhere else in New England. 

From Riverhead west to Islip the unoccupied country is like the plateau 
which lies north of Fayetteville, N. C, largely covered with scrub oak interspersed 
with pine clumps and scattering pines, and bedded with frequent patches of white 
beach sand of ancient deposition threaded by paths running in all directions. Oak 
hammocks alternate with swamps, swales and creek bottoms which harbor deer, 
rabbit and quail, and with ponds and outlets which abound in trout, bass, perch 
and bullheads. Crows, cranes, ducks and bitterns fly from marsh to marsh. 
Hawks and snakes keep the rodents and other vermin pretty well thinned out. 
Here and there along shore may be found the seine of the fisherman, his fish house 
and windmill; clumps of bayberry bushes; sailing craft at anchor; skiffs, punts 
and pungeys drawn up on the shingle' or nestling among the sedge grass on the 
creeks. No less than one hundred steam and sailing yachts go into winter 
quarters at Greenport alone. I could fill up my chapter with Long Island reveries, 
and on the spur of the moment I recall that only last summer I dined with C. F. 
Creary and David Edgar at their bungalow, while their steam yacht rode at its 
anchor before us — recalling how we and Will L. Brooks, owner of the Clytie, of 
the New York Yacht Club, spent our winters forty years ago at St. Augustine, 
Florida, where we Kept canoes for sport at the club house down there. I have a 
gruesome tale of how Brooks was nm over by a steamboat in the Race near 
Plum Gut once upon a time and saved his life in some wonderful way after being 
afloat ten hours on driftwood. This reminds me that shooting coots and sea ducks 
over decoys outside of surf which rolls up among the rocks along the coast from 
Montauk to Maine, the gunners anchor their boats outside the swells and let their 
decoys tail in shore, where the feeders join them among the breakers. The game 
is captious, but the combined wave motion makes good aim and gunshot difficult. 

Back in the 50's woodcocks probed for angle worms all around the environs 
of New York City ; perch and sunfish fanned their fins in the collects ; snipe 
worked the Lispenard marsh above Canal street ; striped bass were caught at 
McCombs dam below High Bridge; blackfish and canners took fiddlers and crab 
bait at Carnarsie, around the wreck of the Black Warrior; tide runners at the 
Narrows showed up four-pound weakfish ; sea bass took the hook all around the 
Brothers at Hellgate ; and our best sportsmen, like Valloton and Genio C. Scott, 
hung up big striped bass at Cuttyhunk on eel-skin squids, and drumfish at 
Barnegat and all along Chesquake creek, where fish swam on tides and ebbs. 



28 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Tom Havemeyer went down to Cobb's Island after plover, and to Martin Point 
and Back bay, near Norfolk, after ducks and black and yellow-leg waders. Trout 
were alive in the Morrisania and Pelhamville ponds and jumped for artificial 
flies in the muse-be-written Bronx. Dr. Robert T. Morris, who inherits 300 
acres of his ancestors, writes to me that game and fish can be snared and shot 
within the metropolis this very day, within seventeen miles of the Grand Central 
depot. And his graphic pen runs in this wise : 

"About two hundred acres of mv country place in Greenwich and Stamford 
is to be devoted to experimental nut orchards, and I am mailing to you an article 
which covers the field of my ambition. The rest of the place is to be kept in 
forest, for two reasons. One reason is because I love to have the Adirondacks 
within seventeen miles of Grand Central depot, and the other reason is because 
the cliffs and swamps forbid agriculture of any sort. There is more than a mile 
of the Mianus river on my property, and some big trout there. Take the canoe 
out of the barn and go a-fishing any day you please this spring. You can firid 
deer tracks in the sand and flush a partridge or quail along the bank. 

"With kindest regards. Yours truly, 

"Robert T. Morris." 

Dr. Morris is the chief of the advisory board of the Canadian Camp, and Dr. 
Lenox G. Curtis leads them all. We older members remember well when Andrew 
Clerk, Jim Conroy, Wm. Mitchell, Dingee Scribner, Chas. F. Orvis, the Pritchards, 
Welch and Leonard, made the greenheart, ash, lance wood, and split cane rods, for 
the anglers, and Dr. J. G. Wood, of Poughkeepsie, cast the longest fly line at 
Watertown, N. Y. Orvis is still living at Manchester, Vt., at 80. 

But my time is speeding. So I remark in an off-hand way that my first 
twenty years were devoted chiefly to the pursuit of knowledge in and out of 
school. In my twenty-second year I took my wedding trip with a wife just 
married, and took her down the St. Lawrence river, where a lurch of the excursion 
steamboat nearly pitched her into the Lachine rapids when she was looking at the 
rocks over the side. The notable officer captain Boxer who fought his battleship 
off from the Pei-Ho forts in China caught her by her clothes and saved her life. 
This was my first acquaintance in Canada, and it goes on to my reminiscences. 

"The first time I remember to have been with ladies in camp — for I had been 
trained in a rougher school — was in 1859, when the Rev. Joseijh C. Fletcher, who 
had been United States Secretary of Legation to Dom Pedro of Brazil, headed a 
party of thirteen couples, with guides and luxurious camp appointments, made up 
at Houlton, Me., in the Aroostook country, and went down to the Grand Lake 
Stream near Rev. Dr. Bethune's favorite camp at the outlet, to fish for landlocked 
salmon. It was during the era of hoop skirts, and when the ladies discarded these 
contraptions upon retiring at night and hung them up in the moonlight at the 
front of our long, open-faced tilt, they looked hke monster spiderwebs. The first 
woman adept with the gun that I ever knew was a sister of Gurdon Trumbull, 
the artist, of Hartford. She was the wife of William C. Prime, and with her 
noted husband was abroad shooting pigeons on the Egyptian Nile from the deck 
of a dahabiyeh in 1848. A Swiss lady, the wife of Fayette S. Giles, who was the 
first president of the Blooming Grove Park Association in 1870-71, together with 
the wives of other members, used to make up the female contingent at the Park 
hostelry in those days; but they seemed out of place then in a boys' game. 
Adirondack Murray encouraged the presence of women in the open woods until it 
was charged that the whole New York wilderness was littered with parasols and 
bits of lingerie, the jetsam of ladies 'going in.' 



EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 28 

Two more little items are worth noticing; One, in 1856, when I came up 
from New York to New Haven with Prof. T. S. C. Lowe and his assistant, David 
Main, of Calais, Me., in company with their balloon. The same old bag was used 
most successfully afterwa-rds in the Civil War. The same astronomer is now in 
charge of the Lowe Observatory of California, and doing good service at the age 
of 96. Second, it was the same year when my friend, A. B. Keeler, left his clerk- 
ship in Wall street. New York, and went into business at Fort Ben'ton, Missouri 
river, under charge of the Conrads, where the elk rubbed their velvet horns on 
the lodge-pole pines in Judith Basin, and redskins laid low. 

In 1858, in July, while I was one of Geo. F. Brott's party of five, with C. C. 
Andrews, Aleck Kincaid and others, driving a spike-tail horse team over the 
"Red River Trail" from Minneapolis to Ft. Garry, we met a string of 120 
shrieking two-wheeled carts, unironed, freighting furs from Selkirk to St. Paul, 
and fighting mosquitoes across the prairie in the charge of half-breed Crces, one 
to six carts drawn by oxen between the shafts. It was a tough chance in fly-time, 
and we all suffered. The animals were rounded up at night and smudged, and 
some of us had Bermuda tar and oil for protection. There was no Winnipeg 
then. That town was started in 1871. 

1 spent the summer of 1859 among the lumber camps of the Aroostook and 
Madawaska, in Maine, and the summer of 1860 in Labrador and Newfoundland, 
bringing out the first photos of the interior ever taken, and the camera man, F. W. 
Knowlton, is still at the same old stand at Northampton, Mass., at the age of 74. 
I wrote up codfishing, cariboo hunting, gnat swarming, and the principal features 
along shore and up the great Eskimo bay as far as the Hudson bay posts, Rigolet 
and Northwest rivers. During the first part of the Civil War I ran the blockade 
by land and water, taking in Nassau and Bermuda, and from 1863 to 1868 I 
traveled over the Maritime provinces and lower Canada and their outlying islands. 
Cape Breton, Anticosti and the Magdalens (Coffin island included), acting as 
correspondent for the Halifax Citizen and St. John Telegraph. Joe Howe, the 
"Blue nose" premier, then said that I knew the country better than he did. Much 
of what I learned was printed in my "Fishing Tourist," which appeared in the 
spring of 1873. 

I passed the winters of 1869-70 among the Sea Islands of Georgia and South 
Carolina, and the five winters following in Florida, culminating with a book 
entitled "Camp Life in Florida." During the ten following summers I was able to 
do the Great Lakes, Georgian Bay, the back lakes of Ontario provmce, the St. 
Lawrence river and many of its tributaries, Anticosti island, the north shore of 
Lake Superior, the Nepigon, the Michigan peninsulas, Mackinac, the knobs of 
Pennsylvania, covered by the Blooming Grove Park; the moonshine region of 
western Virginia, North Carolina and East Tennessee, the coast highlands and 
pine barrens of New Jersey, the interior of New York state and the tide water 
regions of Delaware and Maryland. All interior excursions were made with 
camping outfits by canoe, wagon and saddle. I used to travel light, excepting where 
canoes were required, and never carried a tent until I was 54 years of age. It 
was easy to make a camp or "lean-to" if the weather was bad, or to turn the canoe 
over for a night's shelter and cover up under a rubber blanket. 

And that reminds me of a camp which Colin Campbell and I had at Hamilton 
Pool on the Nepigon fifteen years after. Campbell was a born Nova Scotian, and 
is now a member of the Lawyers' Club in New York City. He has always been an 
expert moose hunter, salmon fisher and mining prospector, and can "endure hard- 



ao AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

ness like a soldier." He has a place (the old family homestead) at Port Medway, 
Lunenburg- county, Nova Scotia, aod I think kills his moose and a score of salmon 
every year, and so did Mariner A. Wilder kill his yearly moose till he died at 87. 
Me first introduced me to the Indians, Noel and Saul, who are experts in moose 
calling and fly-fishers hard to beat, though John, Manuel and Napoleon Comeau, 
Allan Gilmour's river guardian of the Godbout, lower St. Lawrence, have records 
which will take the varnish off of any other exploits and scores. But about the 
Nepigon menu ! Campbell and I had two eighteen-foot birch canoes, with two 
paddlers to each; three of them Crees and one an intelligent half-breed named 
John Watt, whom we procured at the Red Rock Hudson Bay Company's post, 
with our outfit and permit to fish. We were looking for mineral, especially silver 
ore, and expected to be absent ten weeks. I append a copy of the permit which 
was issued forty years ago. It will be interesting at this date, when lieads are gray. 
No license fee was required : 

SPECIAL PERMIT 

Granted by Order of the Minister of Marine 
and Fisheries to Foreigners. 



The holder of this permit, Chas. Hallock, Esq., having duly applied, is allowed 
to angle from 26th June, 1873, to 1st October, 18*3, in Canadian inland waters, 
within the district of the Fishery Overseer countersigning underneath. 

This permit is NOT TRANSFERABLE, and requires strict conformity to the 
various provisions of the Fishery Laws and Regulations. 
Issued at Ottawa, 18th July, 1870. 
Countersigned and dated at Red Rock, Lake Superior, Ontario. 

M. F. Whitcher, Commissioner of Fisheries. 
Jos. Wilson, Fishery Overseer. 

This permit was signed by Robert Crawford, who had then superseded Wilson. 
He was a hard-handed but genial Scot, who had such a grip to his greetings that 
few cared to shake hands with him twice. I sold him my "Perry rifle," which 
was a breech-loading self-capper, described in one of Frank Forester's books., with 
plate, and was a capital tool for zero weather, when fingers were too numb to 
manipulate percussion caps. Crawford afterwards went to Ungava Bay post in 
northern Labrador, and was succeeded by one Flannigan, who was residing in 
St. Paul as recently as 1897. I knew them both. Of the goods which I took 
in exchange for the rifle was a pair of Bedford "cords," which served me in good 
stead until 1895, in varied stress of wear, until I finally turned them over to a 
colored boy in PoUokville, N. C, in that year. We had just come off a wild turkey 
hunt near Prettyman's lumber camp. Thirteen years before, when I was a guest 
of Capt. George K. Sanderson, of the Eleventh U. S. Infantry, who was senior 
captain at Fort Custer, Montana, I had reinforced the leggins with a pair of dress 
bootlegs, which made a capital seat for saddle use in many a subsequent ride, of 
which the most notable was a seven- weeks' campaign in 1878 with Major Jacob 
Wagner, of the U. S. Mounted Revenue Police, in Ashe and Watauga counties, 
North Carolina; Johnson county, Tennessee, and Scott county, Virginia. These 
counties are in the Blue Ridge, and we three rode 1,200 miles in that time over 
"hogbacks" and trails, fishing for mountain trout and hunting illicit stills, of which 
we located no less than 164, besides fighting off hogs which would stand us off on 
the passes and try to hamstring our horses. We had to shoot one of them to get 
past. One of our diversions on that outing was shooting for "beef" with the 



ICARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 31 

mountaineers, but our Springfield carbines proved superior to their Kentucky rifles. 
The record of this trip occupied a page of the New York Herald soon after. 

Returning to the Nepigon, as before mv long digression: I was saying that 
no fee was required from anglers. The monster trout and pike were as free to 
our hand as if we owned the royal preserve ourselves. And when we arrived at 
Nepigon House on the Lake, factor Henri Le Ronde and his half-breed son 
Charley, who had been ed'ucated at Toronto University, showed us a 16-lb. 
speckled trout, which I believe is still the record fish of the species fontinalis. 
On July 4 they put up a series of canoe races for Indians, both sexes, and for 
twelve, fifteen and eighteen feet craft (one paddle, two paddles, four and eight 
paddles), and Campbell and I won in the two-paddle class with a twelve-foot birch. 

But bless me ! how long I am getting to that aboriginal menu at Hamilton 
Pool. Guests of the Canadian Camp Dinner at the Hotel Astor would become 
impatient by this time, but hardly ravenous, I think, when they saw the viands. 
The how of it was this way: Colin Campbell, my angling friend, and I were 
enjoying the evening meal which the handy John Watt had put up for us, when 
we heard a wrangle in the guide's quarter, and went out to ascertain the cause. 
We found our three Indian paddlers seated around a blanket playing cards. The 
stakes were on the middle of the blanket. It seems that they had trapped a gravid 
hare that day, and opened out three immature yourjg ones. These were the prizes 
contested for, and each of the players was eager. When the case wasi decided the 
winner raked in his plunder, and forthwith proceeded to spit each one, hair and 
all, and toast them over the fire. When all were good and crisp he ate them as 
one would bite case sausages, and he was that greedy that he never ofifered to 
share with the others'; but Campbell and I did not hasten to be invited. 

Ravenous ! I was on my way to the Red river portage, or rather to the 
Culebra Cut of that day, which was to open navigation from Red river to the 
Mississippi, when I wandered off to the Nepigon, and I only have now to add that 
the seventy-foot steamboat, "Anson Northrup," which had been hauled over the 
prairie in detail and put together at the entrance of the passage through the 
marsh, ready to proceed, was never floated ! Her bones are there yet, and I 
believe that Capt. Griggs, of Grand Forks, N. D., who was to take her through, is 
also hung up somewhere twixt heaven and earth, if not still living at Grand Forks. 
Yet I think that the real pioneer of Red river navigation was Capt. A. E. Maloney. 
He brought the first steamboat up in 1872, continued freighting for four years, and 
then became proprietor of the "Ingalls House" at Grand Forks. Old Charlie 
Cavileer, for a long while in the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Selkirk, and for 
many years postmaster at Pembina, could tell us if he were living; but he died 
five years ago at the age of 86 or so; or Bill Moorhead might know, or Nelson E. 
Nelson, the old customs officer there for a quarter of a century ; or ex-Repre- 
sentative Jud La Moure, who started so many towns in the northwest corner of 
Dakota Ter. in the 70's, and for whom la Moure county in N. Dakota is now 
named. All the parties I have named were pioneer hunters and marksmen of 
high order as long as forty-five years ago, or more, but the keenest of all cracka- 
jacks in that region is old Cavileer's son Ed, a younger man, who is now post- 
master at Pembina, like his father before him. For ducks, chickens, geese and 
all the game of the country he has no rival, and his gun or pistol are just as good 
as a hammer to drive nails and plug swinging coins. I shot with him often. 

It was in August, 1880, that I completed the "Hotel Hallock," on the line of the 
Minneapolis and Manitoba railroad, in Kittson county, and we had some marvelous 



32 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

sportsmen there and no end of game at that time. E. W. Jad'is, E. H. Fulierton, 
Andrew Sammatt, Bill McGillie, a Scotch half-breed, whose father had served the 
Hudson Bay Company, the Benson boys and the Carneys were in the lead, especially 
for jumping deer, moose, elk, bear and other big game, which was common enough 
then. Bands of elk came within a few miles of town; once a moose ran directly 
through the village, past the post office; a black bear came up out of the bottom 
to play wi'th the school children at recess ; a couple of pet bears were always kept 
on hand for the Swedes to practice boxing on; wolves would tree- settlers in zero 
days when food was scarce; one winter I had an empty store half full of pelts of 
both timber wolves and coyotes; prairie chickens nested on the edge of the town. 
Out on the Roseau there was a famous nesting place among the reeds for wild 
geese, and mallards and teal afforded good sport. Dean Benson took the Phillips 
party out (they were from Penn Yam, N. Y.), and at the end of_three weeks they 
brought in seven moose, two elks, five deer and seven wolves. This was in 
October. The Indians used to bring in considerable game and fish (pike) from 
that section, and once a son of Chief Koopenas killed a whisky trader by way of 
variety. Another chief named Mikenok had been in the earlier tribal wars and 
lost most of his scalp. It is not often that a man lives after losing his "top knot," 
because as a rule he has first been clubbed, shot, knifed or tomahawked. 

Judge John Swainson, of Upsala, of Sweden, and I laid out to raise a stock 
company for a sportsmen's hotel and game preserve and got a few thousand dollars 
subscribed, chiefly from St. Louis people (Col. Hunt and friends), and John 
Davidson, of Monroe, Mich., and A. W. Hubbard, of Philadelphia, came up and 
shot over the ground, and so did Jim Hill, several times. Andrew Carnegie made 
me a call in his private car. But the prospective millionaire declined to help, and 
the scheme fell through for want of a brace. The hotel had a precarious record 
for twelve years, and was destroyed by fire one Christmas eve. I had no insurance. 

But sakes alive ! How I do ramble, sure enough ! I have run fifty years ahead 
of my chronology! When I left the trail I was working over a list of sportsmen 
I had met in my adolescence and early manhood; and as I hark back memory opens 
out a whole galaxy of illuminati whom I met casually in the sanctum of Wm. T. 
Porter, the "Tall Son of York," in the 50's, while I was on the Journal of 
Commerce editorial staff'. I was then contributing some wild west sketches for the 
"Spirit of the Times" over the signature of "Lariat," and that is why I dropped in. 

Charles Banks was a member of the N. Y. Sportsman's Club in 1858, two years 
before me, and is still an active worker in the reorganization of the New York 
Association for Protection of Game and Fish. We used to meet at the Sinclair 
House, at 754 Broadway, and the president occupied a chair made of horns, which 
was presented by "Grizzly Adams," a noted mountain man from the Great Divide. 
P. T. Barnum and he fell together at the old Museum, opposite St. Paul's church, 
and startling exhibitions were given, to which Daniel and the lions were as 
nothing. Then there were Isaac McLellan, who used to do poems for the Journal 
of Commerce when Wm. C. Prime wrote fishing sketches over the signature of 
"W.," and his cousin, Sam'l C. Clarke; Daniel Webster, their intimate angling 
companion ; George A. Boardman, Prof. Plenry and Spencer F. Baird, of the 
Smithsonian ; Robt. Ridgeway, X. Y. Maynard, Edward A. Samuels and his 
partner, H. H. Kimball ; Geo. D. Lawrence, who donated a marvelous bird collection 
to the National Museum, the latter eminent naturalists and game seekers whom 
I knew personally, and often intimately, now gone the way of all the earth. 

Lieut. Geo. F. Ruxton, of the English army, exploited all the notable plainsmen 




SPENCER F. BAIRD. 

FIRST U. S. FISH CU-M .\I ISSKIXEU. 



EARLY RI'XOLLKCTIONS. 33 

hunters and trappers up to the date of his "Life in the Far West." Mountains, 
lakes and buttes commemorate their names : Fremont's Peak, Lake Bonneville, 
Williams Creek, and the rest. Capt. Jim Bridget wrote up the Yellowstone country 
and was classed by incredulous readers with the father of liars. Jim Beckworth, 
a mestizo, born in St. Louis, whose whole family had been massacred by Indians 
on the plains, got someone to edit his remarkable experiences and put them into 
book form. Lieuts. Emory and Geo. M. Wheeler, and Profs. Suckley and Bailey, 
all government experts, had followed on the trail of Lewis and Clarke, Pike 
Fremont and Marcus Whitman (a pupil of my grandfather), and laid open the 
secrets of the Great Divide on both slopes. I suppose it was the perusal of these 
books which drew me to the unexplored region west of the Mississippi, which was 
marked "desert" on my school map. In 1840 there was not a modern hamlet west 
of the Mississippi ; only remnants of the prehistoric civilization in the southwest 
and northwest. The Mexican war opened up a part of the southwest and Santa Fe 
traders and Forty-niners did the rest. Mormon emigration and the Oregon 
colonists laid open the northwest, and the completion of the Union Pacific railroad, 
in 1866, let in the rifif-raflF. After that existence was made uncomfortable for 
buffaloes and Indians. My old Pennsylvania friend. Starkweather, had married 
a Norwegian girl and moved out from Potter county to the Menominee district in 
Wisconsin in 1857, and I fell in with him out there the next year. At the same 
time I met up with Dr. W. Frank Powell ("White Beaver"), of the Buffalo Bill 
type, at La Crosse, when it was only a steamboat landing and grain warehouse 
under the bluff. I also made the acquaintance of Gen. La Due and Banker 
Follett, both still living at great age in Minnesota. 

The renaissance of the gentleman angler had not yet revived in society. There 
had been a hiatus of four centuries since Dame Juliana Berners was Priestess of 
the high hook, which even Izaak Walton and Kit North could not awaken into a 
furore. This interval was devoted to commercial fishing off the coasts of Green- 
land, Labrador, Newfoundland and Sable Island. Nevertheless, there was dear old 
William C. Prime, of "Lonesome Lake" in the White mountains, up back of the 
Profile House, who wrote effusively of the "Old House by the River" and the 
"Owl Creek Cabin Letters," in 1848; and there were others whose advent into the 
province of fluvial sport helped to inaugurate a new era. Prime died at East 23d 
street, New York, a year ago, at the age of 83, surrounded by his curios and 
trophies. It was the last house retained for residence purposes in the block. But 
before I go farther I will say that to cover the list of sportsmen whom I have met 
during my travels through all the states, provinces and territories in the United 
States and Canada, from the Arctic belt to the Caribbean sea, and mention them all, 
would require perhaps 2,000 names. Of these I have filed autographs of one 
thousand. Nevertheless I will begin to shuck out the pile in my next paper, which 
I trust will have more red ears than this one. 



CHAPTER V. 



IN THE SUNNY SOUTH. 



Jotting down my younger wandering trips and travels, one of my first 
winters was in 1860, after my return from Labrador, to report the Democratic 
convention for nominating the next President at Charleston, S. C. It was an 
unfortunate division of delegates, and when the Douglas section was moved to 
Baltimore, old Dan Mixer, proprietor of the Charleston Hotel, wrote me a free 
railway pass thither via Richmond, Va. As the South stood for Breckinridge, of 
Kentucky, I sent a substitute to Maryland while I remained a while down South 
to visit some resident Amherst college graduates who were D. K. E. fellow- 
members with me in 1852-3. On said occasion it was my good fortune to con- 
template the negro in his highest estate "befoh de wah." His condition of servi- 
tude was really enviable. He had all that he wanted and small care. His social 
status kept pace with the families to which he was attached. His African ancestry 
cut small figure. 

In Savannah I met up with Hon. William H. Stiles, who was minister to 
Austria imder President Pierce. His son, George Stiles, was captain of the 
Savannah Volunteer Guards. (Now, this is not a hunting story, but it has to do 
with guns, so it is apropos.) The Stiles family occupied one of the sea islands 
in Warsaw Sound, near White Bluff, where they raised long staple cotton at 37 
cents a pound, and kept blooded stock — horses and cattle — -which ran wild during 
the war, as the plantation was abandoned at the time. They had also a large 
contingent of farm hands and house servants. The musicians of the Volunteer 
Guards was made up from the males of this (Green) island contingent. 

On one occasion Colonel Stiles invited me down to the plantation, where he 
said he thought I would like to hear "a couple of his fifers" play. The band com- 
prised some twenty musicians in all, enough for a good-sized drum corps. We 
found a neatly white-washed cabin, where the Colonel, while he went in quest of 
the fifers, left me with a matronly old colored woman, and a small pickaninny 
crawling about the open fireplace, with its mud and stick chimney. 

"Now, if you will hold the baby," said the Colonel, when he returned, "Auntie 
will make us an ashcake while the music goes on." 

The men put the instruments to their lips, but I did not hear any life 
music, only what seemed at first to be the soft twitter of a singing mouse, appar- 
ently coming from behind a dresser. Then there was a mingled sound like the 
low warble of canaries; first and second parts began to be audible, with more 
rythm and cadence to the notes ; finally swelling into fullest volume. Such 
harmony, I dare say, has never been produced on instruments of this class. Could 
these performers have been shipped to Koster & Bial, in New York, they would 
have commanded tmprecedented prices and crowded the houses to repletion. 

Not long afterwards I began to visit Florida. Some phases of my acquain- 
tance with that part of the country appeared in my book, "Camp Life in Florida," 
which was published in 1876. In fact, I have spent one-half of my life-long 
winters in the South, taking in all the states from first to last, and I may as well 
tell your readers what they will never hear from present generations what kind 

(34) 



IN THE SUNNY SOUTH. Ho 

of plantation tidbits the negroes liked before the war. Only the old survivors can 
tell you how a real hoe-cake used to be made. It is sung in the Old Dominion that 

- "De way to bake a hoe-cake. 
Old Virginny nebber tire, 
Is to slap it on your foot 
And hold it to de fire." 

It is simply a mixiture of corn-meal with water and a little grease, made flat 
and stood up before the fireplace on the back of a heavy plantation hoe. It was an 
invention of old slave times, and is used generally to this day among the lower 
classes. Game hunters always carried a couple of hoe cakes in their shooting 
jacket side pockets and sat on a fence at noon and ate them with peeled turnips 
pulled from the fields. Another favorite relish is corn pone made of meal and 
sour milk with a little shortening. It used to be made in an old-fashioned Dutch 
oven with a handle and cover and baked in the hot coals in the iireplace. When 
done an expert cook seizes the pan by its handle, throws it up in the air, gives it 
a turn and a flop, and catches it on a platter all ready to serve. Ash cakes are the 
same as hoe cakes, except that they are cooked in the ashes between two cabbage 
leaves or corn shucks. Boiled corn meal, called dumplings in eastern North 
Carolina, flapjacks, Johnny cakes, corn dodgers, boiled corn muffins round, gems 
oblong, spoon bread, egg bread, corn mush, boiled cracked hominy, kernels soaked 
in lye and shelled corn pounded in wooden pestles constitute the main menu of 
the antebellum colony. Sportsmen cannot readily dispense with this table d'hote 
at home or in the open field — not even in aristocratic cuisine. Good old Frances, 
superlative cook for Major John B. Broadfoot, of Fayetteville, N. C., serves corn 
meal to order at any given time. Likewise old Sam Hudson and the Benders, of 
Pollokville, up Trent river, will serve an old-fashioned "boiled dinner" in an 
inimitable manner which few housekeepers can do at this age. Moreover, it is 
quite a trick to garnish a Christmas turkey with the very golden corn which lured 
him up to the blind where he lost his life when the hunter shot off his head. There 
is a host of sharpshooters and high grade anglers in that Cumberland country — 
Pemberton, Holt, Luttcloh, Morgan, Col. Mellett, and fifty others — who fish from 
clear water ponds and running streams which are rare down South, and eat plank 
shad and shuck oysters at their inimitable club houses by Cape Fear reservoirs 
and feeders. Rainbow trout and striped bass are common and heavy in that 
marvelous plateau of glaciology. 

By the way, speaking of way back reminiscences, I, may mention casually that 
my large Rand & McNally railroad map, which embraced all the states of the 
period, is a net drag to observers who discover that each line of my peregrinations 
is marked red with my convenient pencil. It is the same on the Canadian Pacific 
early map. Both folders include coastwise and inland routes from ocean to ocean. 
I have added new trails each year. An active spider could hardly have spun his 
own web with more diligent tracery. Maps of the United States are not made 
nowadays as they used to be a half century ago. The scale of miles is different. 
One man cannot live all over the Western country at one time any more. A single 
sportsman may have suffered disappointment by the scarcity of birds which the 
burning off the dry grass in springtime has destroyed, or midsummer drouth 
driven off to more favored places ; yet the whole West should not be condemned 
as barren of game. Doubtless game has disappeared by various causes from 
localities now populated where it once abounded; but, nevertheless, it exists in 
widespread abundance and in remarkable variety ''all over" — if one can procure 



36 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

permits. The woods, grass, lakes, marshes, sloughs and streams are "full of it." 
Having gone through all of the states in my full-fledged maturity with the express 
purpose to spy out the land, every facility was afforded by the railroad and steam- 
boat companies ; but none of them has won the crown and glory of the grand old 
Pennsylvania Central, the great railway artery and vertebral spinebone of the 
United States, whose magnate now dwells installed in marble halls magnificent 
beyond all comparisons. Finger posts at the main station in the great metropolis 
, all point southward. When Presidents Scott and Boyd catered to my travels in 
the TO's, I shifted from north to south by seasons. At the present date there is a 
direct tendency toward the Rio Grande for gun shooters of all sorts. It is a great 
range for road runners, chacalaeas and blue quail, to say nothing of jack rabbits 
and burros. From El Paso to Matamoras, both sides of the river are blent with 
strange characteristics of mixed civilizations which have hitherto been little written 
about till now, when F. I. Madero, a well-known resident of the Mexican quarter 
in San Antonio (called Santone), Texas, has taken the lead of ambitious followers 
after fame. I know the country well! Mestizos sell frijoles (free holders) and 
tamales in the plazas, and the whole country is everywhere slashed and creased 
with wet weather gullies, arroyos and barrancas. It is a rough region to chase 
foxes, rabbits and coyotes, and jump the washouts with bronchos. Even running 
hounds will turn somersaults by mistake. 

My post-bellum intercourse with the South began in the fall of 1868. Woods 
and swamps, which are impenetrable at other seasons, are available then to sports- 
men and prospectors. I was fain to renew my acquaintances with survivors of 
the war. Shooting birds and animals are preferable to killing recruits. On my 
arrival at Savannah I picked up Dr. B. P. Myers, in charge of the hospital, and 
started for Green Island with Dave Adams and George and Sam Stiles to run 
wild cattle on the deserted plantations for meat and sport. Years afterwards 
Myers became post-surgeon at Honolulu, H. I., and now lives in retirement at 
Claremont, California. He gets good pastime at Santa Barbara, and further 
south, at National City, I have a bungalow of my own. Within a quarter of a 
mile I can pick up metals where the army camp stood during our Mexican War 
and each soldier pounded his own corn for daily rations. But my reminiscences 
do not touch that section where I was or recently arrived. It was a frequent 
trip of mine to voyage the Chesapeake and Albermale Canal and Dismal Swamp 
on Capt. Tom Southgate's weekly steamboat when the yellow jasmines hung from 
the forest limbs which overreached the waterway, and. rabbits were seen swini- 
ing across with ears set like a sail boat. Aleck Hunter was a favorite companion 
of mine for thirty years, and we made our first trip, by permission, to Old Pam- 
lico Light, where ducks, swan and geese were plenty around the beaches and the 
Sounds, and Roanoke Island was better. Points, and blinds were at hand all 
around Manteo and Nag's Head, and when the tide was out swans dabbled on 
the flats out of rifle reach, and when a shot was fired above them, masses would 
rise like fleecy clouds above the horizon. Hunter is the most eminent of all 
sportsmen who have studied ornithology. He has filled wonderful volumes with 
bird) shot, written a relation of four years' iservice in the Civil War, and put 
in valuable service in the United States Land Office. Besides, he has given away 
his dress coat and keeps up a lively two-step clog dance at the time of his record. 

Aleck Hunter wrote in March, 1908: "I can readily understand your giving 
away your dress coat, and eschewing suppers. That kind of pleasure I gave up 
when I was fifty years old. It was simply 'Ne vous ne jeu sas le Chandelle.' 



IN THE SUNNY SOUTH. 37 

I studied years ago how to get all the good out of life without paying its penalty, 
and I think you did the same thing — for both of us are phenomenal in health and 
vigor. I have been a dutiful son of old Mother Nature, and the ancient lady has 
treated me tenderly." He' is still diligent in the U. S. land office at the age of 66. 

On one of our trips abroad Capt. Southgate's steamer Newberne, which ran 
semi-monthly between Norfolk and Newberne, N. C, via Washington, he intro- 
duced us to a venerable supervising inspector of steam vessels named Marshall 
Parks, who lived on Freemason street, Norfolk, Va. He must have been eighty 
years old then, and he died afterwards at ninety. He told us a story which modern 
men of business who stand on their record have never heard — how he and 
Cornelius Vanderbilt were partners away back on Albermarle Sound and under- 
taking to raise sweet potatoes, called "Harmon" (so named for the original 
producer), and ship tbem to the New York and Baltimore markets when dug. 
They owned a freighting vessel and were all ready to sail when a terrible storm 
came up and closed in the inlet and shut them out of their tide-water trucking 
business. As a shift Cornelius began running a large steam ferry from the New 
York battery to Staten Island, made big money, and not long after went into rail- 
roading. Somewhere about 1853 he got info possession of the New York Central 
and ordered the nurses and baby wagons out of St. John Park, built up the entire 
square with a freight depot and terminal down town, and warned the old knicker- 
bockers to move up town. Rutherford Stuyvesant was included. He became a 
stockholder of Forest and Stream about twenty years afterwards. So did A. 
Augustus Low, the son of the great tea merchant; J. U. Gregory, of Quebec, and 
Oliver Optic, of Boston. This is an interesting fact to readers of my reminiscences. 

Time was in the 70's and 80's up to 1885 when I was a good enough bell- 
wether for sportsmen to follow when I gave any of them a cue, and tote them 
to a high mountain, like Moses was led aloft to survey the surrounding forest. 
There is no such a delectable elevation as Mt. Pisgah, which stands on George 
Vanderbilt's demesne among the Appalachians. 



CHAPTER VI. 



A SOJOURN IN FLORIDA. 

Mem., an index, tab or tally, serves as an excellent purpose if one under- 
takes to retrieve bygone years. Forty years ago seems short to me. One day 
carries me back instinctively to the time when I went gipsying. Although repeat- 
edly interrupted by spasms of business activity and speculative ventures, my 
pursuits were reciprocally subordinated to each other. An active temperament tires 
a man of the monotony of a permanent tenable home. Well-to-do people are 
apt to travel. Consequently, when my only son of thirteen years was called by 
death on February 22, in 1869, I closed my residence in Brooklyn. N. Y., and 
skipped with my wife to a warmer climate, where nature smiles when mourners 
weep. Thence forward for the five years previous to my starting my "Forest and 
Stream" we were always moving about states, provinces and territories, and from 
one Indian reservation to another, and I would always locate her at available 
stopping places while I went prospecting. 

In those fallow days, when sportsmanship was not a fine art, and the latest 
style of a shooting jacket alone gave a man the entry into exclusive clubs, we 
inevitably carried guns for protection, provender and pastime, depending upon them 
to keep the camp larder supplied. Hunting for the pot was entirely legitimate 
and an incident of the outing. Deer meat, squirrels, ducks and quail or any other 
game all went into the same stew at each meal. That was old moose hunter 
Warner A. Wilder's practice and mine in Muskoka or any other part of Canada. 

In the spring of 18i70 I put in most of my time with Dr. Chas. J. Kenworthy, 
of Jacksonville, Fla., on the cruise of his catboat "Spray" from Cedar Keys to 
Punta Rassa, and later at the Indian river with Fred A. Ober. On the west gulf 
cormorants lined up like regiments of soldiers on the shores of the wooded isles 
at Cedar Keyes, and red cedar pencils were plenty. At Homosassa we found 
Greene Smith and wife, of Albany Journal, keeping a boarding house for sports 
who caught 25 pounds of redfish in the river, interviewed a great alligator sunning 
on the river side, alert to slip into the water down his slide like an otter when 
alarmed. He was said to be seventeen feet in length. Grape fruit, the largest 
grown, on trees as great as were ever seen, were wonders on premises once 
occupied by Senator Yulee, before the Civil War, during which period he became 
Secretary of the Confederate Navy. 

A tidy excursion steamer one day took us down to Jones' on Sarasota Bay. 
Coral reefs, channels and nigger heads were traversed all the way when the wind 
and weather were fair. When it stormed bird fliers were smashed against the 
glass of Egmont lighthotise by the dozen, and the keeper put in his spare time in 
taxidermy to set 'em up again. On the way to Tampa we met old John Gomez 
hauling his boat up the beach. He was a lively old skipper of 87 years of age, 
who lived until July 23, 1902. He was born in 1791. His age is verified by the 
church registry at St. Augustine. He died at Tarpon Springs, Fla. He used to 
take sea anglers out fishing for big fish. 

On the way to Cedar Keys we stopped off at Gainesville and slipped into 
Gulf Hamik, where cattle run wild, and found a party of sportsmen which had 

(38) 



A SOJOURN IN FLORIDA. 39 

been attacked by a herd of them. A big bull ran one of the boys up a twenty-foot 
"palmetto," took the limber trunk between his horns, wagged his head, and tried 
to shake him out of the tree. His comrades, who heard his call for help, arrived 
just in time to scare the animal off. This immense wilderness runs parallel with 
the coast some sixty miles. The southern point is not far from Ocala, and a 
horseman used to carry a mail bag there from Homosassa. Matters are different 
now. There are more people in the vicinity and fewer ferocious cattle. 

On my way east I took an excursioni up the St. Johns river, called at Harriet 
Beecher's up stream, took a bath at Green Cove Spring, stopped off at Palatka, 
where the Vermont Chas. F. Orvis' brother kept a winter resort, caught bass 
opposite the house, ate oranges and bananas at Hart's orchard and plantation, 
heard a six-foot diamond rattlesnake sing at Mrs. Blonson's. I called at Will 
Fuller's beautiful place, located on a shell mound just above hers. His wealthy 
father and uncle were brewers of Brooklyn, N. Y., and James was the Master 
Mason of Commonwealth Lodge in 1857, when I was "made." He was one of 
the first orange growers from his section. 

It was a delightful ride up river to Enterprise, Sanford and Lake Worth, 
passing between the patches of lettuce, blue hyacinths, green arrow-heads project- 
ing from the water spaces frequented by snakes and alligators, so dense that the 
steamer could hardly push through them. At the Enterprise Hotel, on the lake 
side opposite Sanford, we had a six-foot alligator tied to a stake by a stout six-foot 
rope and set a big dog on it. The beast would hiss like a fighting cat, and when 
he swung his tail at the dog to floor him the snap of the rope threw him with a 
somersault. We did not like to have the scaly prisoner teased, but people would 
like to see the amusement. 

I devoted the following summer to assisting President Fayette S. Giles and 
Lafayette Westbrook, state representative, to set up the notable Blooming Grove 
Park, securing Ezra Cornell, David Dudley Field, J. K. Morehead and others for 
directors of this superlative preserve in Pike county, Pennsylvania. Ira Tripp, of 
Scranton, gave us a pet black bear which future lady members fed with cake, ice 
cream and watermelon. Big Joe grew to eight feet tall when he stood on his hind 
feet at four years of age. One sunny day in midwinter, when the snow melted on 
the "knobs" and he thought spring had come, he slipped his collar in this hillside 
den, went up to the club house to see the place, and the temporary care-taker poked 
his rifle through the blinds and killed him on the veranda. To mention the 
historical incidents of its forty years' lifetime and name its notable club members, 
would fill a readable volume of interest, such as the versatile and veritable 
Fred. E. Pond — of "Turf, Field and Farm" — furnished to the public twenty odd 
years ago. There is much to his record as well as to mine. 

As the winter months passed on to spring, I turned to East Florida and crossed 
over from Tocoi to St. Augustine on Judge Wilmot's improvised wooden railroad. 
He was an enterprising man of the highest sort. He was able to give the moving 
public comfortably quick transit just after the Civil War ended, when the South 
was so miserable that no one had a dollar or credit after the long struggle. Its 
entire rolling stock was essentially home-made. I penciled off a sketch of it at 
the time. 

The tracks had no iron straps and the road no bed. There were neither 
freight nor passenger cars per se, taxonomically speaking, but the carriages were a 
droll combination of the flatcar and the old-fashioned Concord coach, each one 
seating twice three persons, vis-a-vis, inside. Baggage and freight, if there happened 



40 



AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 



to be any, were both carried outside on either extremity of the projecting platform, 
and if inside space were by chance overcrowded, the trunks and boxes afforded 
convenient sittings for tourists who were fond of forest scenery and a quiet smoke 
in the open air. In that respect the improvised vehicles resembled the modern 
observation cars, though outriders were wholly unprotected from sun or rain. 
It usually occupied three hours to make the run of fifteen miles across the neck 
from the St. Johns river to the ocean. When special dispatch was demanded an 
old white horse was substituted to run as express. He would make the transit in 
two hours and a half. Of course, the train went light at such times. The 
Tocoi railroad was the first railroad in Florida. It existed before the war. 
Without such a railroad St. Augustine was practically isolated. The land between 
it and the river was virtually a swamp, in many places without a bottom, and a 
tramway was much cheaper and more easily constructed than a wagon road of dirt. 
No vestige of the old plant remains. 



- .-( y-'- 




r^^_ 




l^^/'-^^^^^^ij^^^^^-^^^^^j^^^^^r?-^^^; 






EAiiLY RAliJUiAi' \\l\\\ iX "■ J„ORiT).\., 



The next fall I found the persistent canoe man, N. H. Bishop, on the Indian 
river with Fred A. Ober. Both were naturalists. One was especially in quest of 
fancy feather birds of all colors along the shore arid among the swamps and 
timber, and up the Oclawaha, including snake birds (plotar anhinge), with a neck 
longer than its body, which could swim better than they could fly. When a small 
excursion steamer carried tourists up stream at night with a fire power on the 
bow to help shove the boat around the bends, lots of native birds would be 
scared off their roosts fnom the overhanging branches when the flashlight passed 
underneath "chugging." It was an exciting scatteration. Ober had a wiry working 
partner with him named Jim Russell, who was a keen alligator hunter for their 
hides. One time he dove to the bottom of a lagoon and knifed one which had 
sounded. The trio were exploring the everglades, and about this time shoved 
their houseboat four miles up the Kissimee-choked morass waist deep, with 
alligators and snakes all around them, to say nothing of swarming mosquitoes, 
red bugs and tormenting insects innumerable. His object was to find the 
Okechobee once more after the Seminole War closed in 1838. He was the first 



A SOJOURN IN FLORIDA. 41 

white explorer who had penetrated since, and the whole covert was virtually an 
incognito, except to veterans like my venerable friend, Major Hamilton Merrill, 
who followed on to my "Forest and Stream" office in 1873. He died about 86 
years of age and his surviving son is getting old fast, too. He was prominent at 
Albany. N. Y., for years. His father chipped in with the rest of us to complete 
our "Camplife in Florida" in 1870, and old man Samuel Clarke, of Newton, Mass. ; 
Wm. H. Gregg, of St. Louis, and C. J. Kenworthy, of Jacksonville, filled in the 
correct ornithology for the composite book and told us where to catch the best 
fish. Old man Gregg must be 8o now all right, but he still sails his "Odion," and 
has invited Barton Evermann, myself and Tarleton Bean to beat the November 
gales to Key West every year the past few winters. Meanwhile his son-in-law 
is president of the Canadian Pacific railroad to the Rupert terminus. 

I might have much to say of Fred. A. Ober ("Fred. Beverly"). No worker and 
producer is more worthy of honor and eminence. But he is not in quest of a niche 
or pedestal, or to be hung in a gallery. 

Mr. Ober may be said to have made his debut through "Forest and Stream," 
which became his earnest patron and promoter at the outset of his career; and 
its quondam editor, who writes these lines, delights to do him honor in his own 
peculiar, rough bon hommie. 

In 1876 Mr. Ober had charge of the "Hunter's Camp" at the Centennial Expo- 
sition in Philadelphia, a most attractive exhibit in Lansdowne Ravine, where he 
■figured conspicuously as a veritable Leather-Stocking in backwoods costume, his 
swarthy locks aiding very materially to embellish the character which was not all 
assumed. 

After the West Indies and South America, — as far as the mouth of the 
Orinoco, — came the several extensive tours of Mexico, beginning in 1881. In 
the course of one of his cross-country trips, in 1883, he traveled 10,300 Mexican 
miles, and climbed to the summit of the Popocatapetl, 17,800 feet upward. When 
Ober cannot delve he will soar ! 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE WILD WEST. 



Roaming at large among the states and territories during the TO's the shifting 
seasons were followedi year after year without any special purpose on my part, 
winning or losing, accepting nature's gifts and taking chances wherever I pitched a 
camp or drove a stake, north or south, or elsewhere. Yet among the wild Indians 
in our reservations there was risk when buffaloes were running, and really trouble 
moreover was at hand. Army posts-were distributed all over the prairies, and I 
frequently dropped in to report when a storm threatened. I stopped in at Fort 
Custer ten weeks one year with Senior Captain Sanderson, 11th Infantry, by 
invitation, with my wife along. But that was in 1881, after the war was fought, 
and all over redskins were subdued and made captives. Meanwhile I cut across 
country. 

Whatever happened at large is but an echo and an imitation of history, which 
extended from 1804 to about 1860 under the reign of the explorers, Lewis and 
Clarke. 

You see the breech clout Indian vanished as soon as the freighters and 
traders enabled them to be called blanket Indians. After the buffalo slaughter 
was ordered in 18'75 they adopted felt hats. I saw lots of old felt hats in the 
Sioux camp at Little Big Horn, where the departing warriors, after the Custer 
massacre, left their lodge poles standing and empty kettles on the ground. I was 
at Chetopah, on the Kansas line of Indian territory, when some of the buffalo 
hunters fitted out with splendid mounts and a grand flourish to deplete the redskins' 
larder by government edict, and I was on the Yellowstone in 1881, following the 
winter when the last wholesale slaughter of the buffalo and antelope took place in 
the deep snow along the bottom. Tihe string of carcasses as^ I saw them (all the 
antelopes and most of the old buffaloes remaining "unpeeled") was at least one 
hundred miles long, sometimes in clusiters just as they were shot in their tracks, 
with intervals of mesa between, and again in single file or by twos and threes, for 
rods together. It was a gruesome sight, for the wolves had exposed the bones of 
all whose skins had been taken by eating off the meat. There were no hungry 
wolves that year. Not a howl was heard. 

The year previous, in 1874, Congressman Fort, of Illinois, had introduced a 
bill to protect the buffaloes, but those whose business was to fight the Indians had 
already decided that the least dangerous, least expensive and most expeditious 
method was to destroy their rations and wipe out their subsistence. Knowing the 
game that was on the Indians fought desperately at the Little Big Horn, and all 
along the navigable rivers in Montana the steamboat men had to ironclad their 
pilot houses to protect their river men from marauders on the cliff. The sagacious 
Crows were then quite willing to cede the right of way to the Northern Pacific 
railroad in 1881, whereby they might receive food to supply the lack of buffalo meat. 

Referring to the action and display of buffalo and antelope afield on the 
Arkansas in the TO's, Dr. A. J. Woodcock writes poetically : 

(42) 




if l»- 




DR. A. J. WOODCOCK. 



THE WILD WEST. 48 

"Yes, far back from the river, in places the buffalo grass stood one foot in 
height, while the luxuriant growth of grass in the river bottoms at times in places 
almost hid the Arkansas from view; in almost every plains visited the prairie 
runners, as the Indians called the antelope, added life, the very poetry of all 
motion to the view ; the lesser prairie folk that fly, run and crawl were most 
abundant and seemed to think that the beautiful prairie lands bordering the river 
were made for them, while the scattered groves of cottonwood trees assured the 
prairie traveler of abundance of wood for his campfire, and that everywhere in 
those reaches of the river that were bare of trees, ready to hand, was the 'bois 
de vache,' the buffalo chip — it was borne in upon one that the materials of a good 
camp, wood, water and grass, as stated above, were ready to hand, which with the 
plethora of game and the dryness of these sandy meadows bordering the Arkansas, 
especially when the prairie lands were a dreary wilderness of mud, of a verity 
made them seem to the old plains wanderers what in fact they were * * * 
most hospitable. 

"Yours to the end of the trail, 

"Dr. a. J. Woodcock." 

The doctor calls special consideration to the fine writings of the late notable 
sportsmen, Col. Geo. D. Alexander and Wm. C. Kennerly, who wrote for the 
outdoor press and nature over the name of "Old Dominion," where the latter 
harked the wide-awake foxhounds most around Fairfax section. He says : "I 
have both of them in my studio in pen and photo, afoot and mounted, and many 
an English lord and earl, the Atlantic sea across." His brilliant pen never rests 
while in action. And he quotes from Kennerly in this way: "I have been touched 
by Dr. Woodcock's personal allusion to myself because, presumptuously, I thought 
that I could distinguish some similitude between Colonel George D. Alexander and 
myself. We are about the same age — eighty-three or eighty-four years old — both 
have been Confederate soldiers, both devoted sportsmen, and better than all, both 
chock full of good, rich, red Scotch blood, and the same with regard to our 
friend. Colonel Gordon ('Pious Jeems'). of Mississippi, for I believe that we 
are all three nearly allied blood kin." Gen. Wade Hampton is included among his 
comrades, and I have been his associate repeatedly at Sapphire, Toxaway, in 
Transylvania, N. C, of recent years. I think he died some five years ago in his 
eightieth year at Highlands, S. C. 

The October issue of Field and Stream, for 1908, has an article of mine which 
starts with a duck hunt in Wake county. North Carolina, and ends with the 
capture of a noted "moonshiner." The incidents are quite diflferent from ordinary. 
And this puts me in mind of a seven-weeks" scout I had with Major Jacob 
Wagner, U. S. A., in 1878, among the mountain ranges of Matanga and Asihe, in 
North Carolina, Johnson county, Tennessee, and Scott, in Virginia. We pulled a 
lot of illicit stills during the outing, and when I drew out of the scrimmage I left 
the field for Aberdeen Courthouse, Va., in company with Marshal Kyle (who was 
afterwards killed), each riding double with a culprit up behind. To say that I 
felt out of place is a sore confession, for my sympathies were with the men who 
could not earn a dollar (each) in any other way while they dwelt in the mountains, 
where ingress and egress in those days was not possible except by a half-barred 
sled hauled over a trail. Even the streams afforded us exit. We could wade out 
that way. Anderson, son of C. Bird Jenkins (seabird), showed us where the best 
trout fishing was, and took us straigilit to his still and treated us to corn whisky. 
It broke my heart to be caught in company with the revenue officers and at once 
be suspected as a decoy by the man they snapped. It was a surprise party to me, 
and I quit the business at the first leave. 



44 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

That same year I had an up&et at Pig's Eye Bar, just below St. Paul, to pay 
for it. My friend, D. C. Estes., a naturalist, started in his own sailhoat for a 
voyage down the river to Lake City, camping out and shooting July woodcock by 
the way. Our outfit was complete in every par^ticular, and a grand time was antici- 
pated, but disappointment soon came, for when about one mile below town a flaw 
of wind jumped the high cliff and struck the sail, and the boat at once went over 
in mid river and in deep water. Numerous bundles, carpet-bags, guns, rods, 
blankets, tents, in fact everything, was either set afloat or sent to the bottom, 
Being a good swimmer, I set out boldly in boots and corduroys for land, 
while the doctor, to save the boat from going down stream and himself 
from going to the bottom, stuck to the craft, and setting himself astride of the 
capsized boat, succeeded, after about one hour's hard paddling, in reaching the 
shore. The boat, as soon asi possible, was righted and bailed out, and gave chase 
to the floating bundles, and valises, but before they could be reached all had sunk 
but one of little consequence. Two valuable guns, a great quantity of tackle of 
every description, composing the outfit; all the clothing, money and other valu- 
ables were lost. Fifteen hundred dollars would hardly cover the loss. 

I recall my numerous friends among the shooting clubs at Price Lake and 
round about : Timberlake, Seabury, Zimmerman, E. F. Warner, R. W. Mathews, 
Geo. R. Finch. 

At the traps I used to average three to five birds out of ten, but my comrades 
expected better things. 

The best field work I ever did was among the July woodcock in the cornbrake 
of Bay City, Mich. A companion sportsman and I walked down parallel rows, 
one shooting to the right and the other to the left, so as not to hit each other. 
The dog took the center to flush the birds. We bagged a dozen fine ones and 
took them to the hotel. The cook burned them to a crisp. Blackbirds used to 
flock by millions in North Dakota during the grain harvest. They would rise in a 
cloud so dense as to obscure the sun. I fired two barrels into the mass and 
dropped fifty-seven killed and wounded. Geese in the fields were better game. 
Coming home at dark after a successful bunt in the Gereaux Slough back of 
Pembina in September I shot at a blue wing teal over my head and dropped him. 
As he fell a barred owl dove for him at the flashlight out of the dark and I 
got him with my second barrel. 

Once on the Yellowstone, near Pryor's Creek, I climbed the top of a bluff, 
and peering over the edge of the bank rested my gun on the sod where a bevy 
of sage hens were going through a minuet, and dropped seven, one after another, 
until I had killed the most of them. The fool hens couldn't guess what struck 
them, and the noise of the gun did not scare them. Talk about pot-hunting, I was 
right in it. I strapped the heads into the bights of as many leather whangs which 
were tied to my saddle and started down to the bottom among the plums and 
cottonwoods. Lieutenant Fuller, a soldier from Fort Custer, took one side of the 
timber belt and I the other, looking for bush deer. Returning I ran up against a 
big grizzly which had ridden down a plum tree between his legs and was busy 
pulling the plums off a branch by the armsfull. He had the stem of the tree under 
him between his hind legS' and the branches close to his face. He looked at me 
for an instant, and regardless continued his repast. I concluded not to meddle 
with him and rode out of the timber. When I reached the mesa I found just one 
chicken head in its loop. In my interview with Ephraim I forgot about the dead 
birds at my saddle bow. 



THE WILD WEST. 45 

I have knocked about bhe state of Kansas a good deal during the 70's — among 
the sunflowers, grasshoppers and tumble weeds. Old John Swainson. of St. Paul, 
and I had' to carry a box of ice with us when hunting prairie chickens one hot 
September to put on the' top of his red setter's head to keep him sane. The 
simoon wind was so burning that we had to get behind a wheat stack to keep 
from being fanned. The same old dog was caught up by a straight tornado at the 
town of Hallock, Minn., in 1880, which jerked and whirled him over and over an 
eighth of a mile over the prairie while fast to his kennel. When rescued after the 
blow was over, he ran under our bed and staid there for twenty-four hours, 
trembling. As to Kansas, our famous bird shooter, A. C. Waddell, writes me a 
recent letter from New Jersey, which happens to chip in a most interesting opinion 
on that section, which I append right here. He says: 

■'I spent almost twenty years in Kansas and Kansas City, Mo. What a life of 
pleasure interspersed with trouble I had. Dr. Nicholas' Rowe, of the American 
Field, remarked to a gentleman in San Francisco once: 'That man (meaning me) 
would have been a very wealthy man ihad he used the same energy in mercantile 
business as he has in sportsmanship, but he loved the occupation of the sportsman 
with his dogs afield and he has devoted all his life to hunting and fishing.' I do 
not regret it. I am 75 years old May 25 coming — hair black, and they say as well 
preserved as any man they ever knew. I owe it all to outdoor exercise and in the 
saddle. I am now cooped up for want of opportunity to be in a game country. I 
want to be in the field. I saw Charles H. Raymond not long since — fat and content 
with wealth. He bought dogs and gave large prices. 

"The pioneers of sportsmanship are the ones who had the real sport. What 
a field Kansas presented to those who traveled over the old Santa Fe trail during 
the years from 1868 to 1876^ — great prairies over which the deep ruts made by the 
prairie schooners years before appeared — covered with grass, with here and 
there wild sunflowers and the endless variety of prairie flowers. To be in such a 
field with dog and gun and to see the rise of the prairie chickens as they sailed 
away before you— what a life to live and what a life to think back over. 

"I have no fault to find and I thank my God that he so directed my course 
of life that it led me to pleasant places. I have been to and over all the Kansas 
rivers and creeks. Most every farmer in Kansas knew me. I camped on their 
farms .and was ever welcome, for I returned favors. From Kansas I went to 
California, lived' there six years, was familiar with a'U sections of the .state. After 
that, in 1895, I moved) to Mississippi and remained there five years, all this time 
accompanied by the finest lot of setters and pointers the North could produce. 
Six years ago I returned to my birthplace — by invitation — to live out the few 
rem'aining years that I may have, and it is pleasant, very pleasant, to be in com- 
munication with Chas. Hall'ock. 

"Your friend ever, 

"A. C. Waddell." 



CHAPTER Vni. 



LITERARY WORK AND TRAVEL. 



When the great moral uplift in out-of-door recreation began to be felt, some 
forty years ago, the title selected for its mouthpiece by its accredited leader, Arnold 
Surges, was "The American Sportsman." But this did not fully express the 
peculiar .i:haracter of pastime which nature affords in her simplicity and attractive- 
ness. So "Forest and Stream" was substituted as a catch word, and all the 
gunners and anglers said "Amen !" I took the lead of its 600 subscribers and was 
in personal touch and step with them. All celebrities, army officers, explorers, 
scientists, Indian missionaries, plainsmen, mounted police, seafarers and wayfarers, 
Canadians and neighbors from across the international line, a famous galaxy — 
no man can remember his acquaintances — but whose brightness may now be 
made to reappear in remembrance, and they followed to learn the way to choice 
shooting grounds, where I had beaten the bush in years before. Chas. Reynolds, 
just from college, prepared the guide which I had compiled. 

They were good worthies whose acquaintances I had made while I worked up 
my "Fishing Tourist" in 1873. I then had twenty-five years^ of travel with rod 
and gun to my credit. Governor Horatio Seymour, of New York, headed that list 
and put up fifteen dollars as a three-years' subscription. He banked on its long 
life, and it has lived thirty-eight years. Geo. Bird Grinnell, who accepted "Forest 
and Stream" from my hands as chief when I dropped its management, has been 
a wonderful sportsman ever since among the Blackfeet and herds and heads of 
Wyoming. Previous to that he was with the government explorer, F. C. Hayden, 
in 18i74. He stocked up on natural history and wild Indians then, and has published 
valuable books innumerable. 

I had devoted the summers of 1870-3 to canvassing members for Blooming 
Grove Park Association, with headquarters at No, 111 Fulton street. New York, 
picking whortleberries, putting up a club bouse on Lake Giles, and roping deer 
which swam across the water to elude the chase of the hounds, so as to put them 
in our wire paddock as a game preserve. Our warden, Ed Quick, was not slow to 
keep them from poachers, and Capt. Cassell, of Baltimore Druid Park, and Col. 
Clark, of Tennessee, gave us many — 200 head — from their surplus. 

In 1870 Charles Dickens touched my elbow at Westminster Hotel, in Irving 
Place, while in company with Fayette S. Giles, nineteen years before he wrote up 
his American Notes on the Red River in Louisiana. In 1858 I met ex-Senator 
Henry M. Rice, of Minnesota, when he was one of three Indian Commissioners. 
He was on his way up to Leech lake and had to stop over night with his friend 
at the old log hostelry of Mrs. McCarty, on the edge of Wisconsin. She charged 
fifty cents each meal and 50 cents for a lodging. The transients asked "for baked 
potatoes and boiled eggs, or something you don't handle with your hands." It wae 
early dark morning, and the room was lighted with an only candle. She carried 
an axe in her band as she was passing from the woodpile to replenish the fire, and 
she replied: "Ate yer breakfast, or I'll give ye the contents of this axe." And she 
was reported as having killed a female helper in the same way. In 1871, on my 
return from the great lakes of the West, I was given a seat next to Lord Duflferin, 

(46) 




COL. A. EGBERT, 

Contributor to "Forest and Stream. 



MR. \V. M. TILESTOX, 
Associate Editor. 





MR. ED H. HOPE, 

Well-known Dog Trainer. 



MR. A. X. CHEXEY, 
Popular Writer on Anglin^ 



FRIEND.S OF CHARLES HALLOCK. 



LITERARY WORK AND TRAVEL. 



47 



the author of "High Latitudes," at Fred Cumberland's banquet at the Rossin 
House in Toronto. Then Dr. James H. Richardson, who was present, prepared for 
myself and wife a special trip to the Upper Ottawa country for a few days' fishing 
in the mountain lakes about Des Joachim, and I have his letter before me, dated 
Toronto, July 12, 1875. You see, readers, that my portfolio and pigeon holes are 
crammed with uncalendared tales to print. With changing seasons I was wont to 
change my trips from state to state and latitude to longitude. All this time my 
staff was serving as recording angels — William C. Harris, Barnett Philips, Wm. M. 
Tileston, G. M. Taylor and Horace Smith, besides Reynolds and Grinnell. 
Poor Tileston was killed by a wall falling on him and young Webb, while the 
Westminster dog show was going on. It was a sad accident. My office desk kept 
me fully eight months. Four months chiefly engaged me annually at the So'uth. 





MR. FAYETTE S. GILES, 
Secretary Blooming Grove Park Association. 



MR. H. H. THOMPSON, 
Angler and Angling Writer. 



I went to Menchan, Rigolet and Ponchartrain with C. G. Ballejo, the best of 
southern bass anglers. At Port Aransas, Texas, which swarms with ponies, 
ducks and tarpon, my business man, Wm. C. Harris, used to take Perie with him 
to paint fish he caught for his forthcoming illuminated "fish book." He died some 
four years ago at 74. The sporting ground was quiet when I dragged a trailing 
spoon or squid ; but nowadays, when the government has taken hold on the 
premises for special uses, the boats which start for the fishing ground string out 
in a dozen trailers, as they have done for half a century at Alexandria Bay, where 
I caught my heavy muscalonge among the St. Lawrence Islands while housed at 
Grossman House. There are even better fish around the North Carolina sounds 
and inlets — much better house boats congregate. While our friend, Washington 
A. Coster, hunts for deer and prods hibernated alligators out of their mud holes in 
quest of salmon, I resort to the cold streams of my long life friends, W. H. Wood- 
ward, of Birmingham. Ala. ; Ivers W. Adams, of Boston, and the late lamented 
General Surgeon Baxter, of the U. S. Army, whose mansion on the Restigouche 



iH AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

was an attractive resort for special guests, where high-grade fish portraits were 
painted wonderfully and true to life by his dexterous wife. I had hoped to have 
his Indian birch canoe and his appearance in dress uniform be shown in this self- 
chapter; but it will doubtless come in a future de luxe volume. His summer house 
was burned fifteen years ago, and now the entire Campbellton population of 2,000 
was burned last year, bodily and totally. 

In 1874-5 there went forth- ai^ edict from the government, sub rosa,to cut off 
subsistence of the plains Indians by slaughtering buffaloes, elk and antelope. In 
consequence the wolves starved as well as the redskins, but of late years they 
have fared much better, where they can fatten on the homesteads of the spreading 
settlers. 

Once, away back, when Fred E. Pond was hunting prairie chickens in Wis- 
consin, he held up a train for five minutes, on which I was traveling, and obtained 
a momentary interview with me. Then he waved a signal and the train moved on. 
He was just of age, and good stuff. 

In Canada the French (habitans) and half-breed guides and voyageures were 
very tractable and serviceable, and drank whisky "only when I did" by agreement. 
But let the redskins appear in a later chapter. I will introduce a lot of them 
whom I met I have a list of a hundred or more ; and also a list of my army 
comrades, who ranged the plains over and wrote up essays for "Forest and 
Stream." I missed few frontier posts from boundary to*boundary, north to south, 
Maine to Texas', and Pembina to Caddo in the Nation. I spent ten weeks with my 
wife at Fort Custer, in Montana, with Senior Capt. G. K. Sanderson, of the 11th 
Infantry, and Capt. Hamilton, of the Cavalry. We went out shooting and trout 
fishing in Big and Little Horn, Lodger's creek. Black canyon and up the 
Yellowstone. .Trout fishing and grayling everywhere. Old man Finkley. on 
Prior's creek, showed us the best fishing places. That was in 1881, not so very long 
after General Custer's soldiers were wiped out by the Sioux (in 1876), and our 
river boat pilot houses were sheathed with iron plates to keep off bullets from the 
overlooking plateau, where Indians would ambush and shoot at us as we passed. 
We had some- good shooting of our own — at geese — on the mud flats in midstream 
as our stern-wheel burrow chugged up the quick water. That same year I stopped 
with Major E. B. Kirk at Bismarck for a day, when they brought in Sitting Bull 
as a prisoner from Fort Yates below. At Terry's Landing, on the Big Horn, 
there was a covered way from the cantonment to the river side, where the soldiers 
went for water, to keep from being shot by the Sioux, who were still on the 
warpath. I put up with Lieutenant Wheeler. The same year General Phil 
Sheridan was in the Rockies with the dukes hunting grizzlies, when G. O. 
Shields (magazine writer) joined the outfit at Ft. Custer and afterwards published 
a volume of the battle and exploits, with photos of pelts and trophies won. 
Captain Partello wrote up many hunting stories for the "American Field," and so 
did Lieutenant Schwatka. Such men are worth mentioning. 

In course of time I worked my way eastward as far as Fargo, N. Dak., 
about October 1, and found Editor Hull, of the "Republican," whom I had known 
at Presque Isle, Maine, in 1859, where he was editor of the "Pioneer." Here 
is what he printed about my western trip. Every resident was interested; it was 
a critical time : 

"He says that the buffaloes • are running between the Missouri and the 
Yellowstone. He saw the first buffalo about fifteen miles east of Fort Custer, and 
while standing in the door of the stage ranch was fortunate enough to shoot one. 
The herd commenced moving southward about the middle of August, and two 



LITERARY WORK AND TRAVEL. 49 

were killed on the loth of August within fifteen miles of Glendive. They are most 
numerous between the Dry Fork of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, at a point 
about thirty miles west of Keogh. The Crows, Cheyennes, and many white 
hunters are in full pursuit, killing and skinning these animals at the rate of 150 a 
day. The herd is now crossing the Yellowstone into the Crow reservation ; it may 
be for the last time, provided the Northern Pacific railroad gets through there 
before another year rolls around. Mr. Hallock says that there are about ten 
hunters, red and white, to one buffalo, and the race of the American bison is 
almost run. 

Several parties of gentlemen have been, and some of them still are, hunting 
in the Big Horn mountains, all of them without exception fitted out at Fort Custer. 
A. M. Jameson, an Irish gentleman from Dublin, has been in the mountains for 
five weeks, and in that time has killed twenty-nine grizzly bears. Count Andrassy, 
a lieutenant in the Austrian service and a grandson of Count Andrassy, the states- 
man, with a party of five other gentlemen, have also had good success in capturing 
grizzlies, as well as numerous deer and other game. 

Jas. Lillidale, Esq., and wife, and Otho Shaw, brother of Vero Shaw, the 
well-known dog fancier, and author of several treatises on the canine race, are 
now in the mountains. Their sport, however, was temporarily interrupted by a 
stampede of the pack mules, every one of which ran back to Custer and had to be 
recovered before they could pursue their sport. 

G. O. Shields, Esq., correspondent of the "American Field," of Chicago, and 
Mr. Huffman, the photographer of Miles City, with an outfit, had just returned 
from a trip to the mountains when Mr. Hallock left Custer, after seventeen days' 
absence, during which they had captured a good many photographs, some grizzlies 
and other game. 

Mr. Hallock himself has traveled five hundred and fifty miles by wagon and 
saddle, engaged in several hunting expeditions, outfitted at Custer, where he was a 
guest, and among other experiences was present at the council at the Crow agency 
for the purpose of securing the right of way through the Crow reservation for the 
N. P. R. R. He has carefully looked the country over with especial reference to 
the interests of the N. P. R. R. Co., reaching the extreme western end of the 
western survey, and will write a seriesi of letters for the New York "Herald," 
which we feel sure may be depended upon as an accurate and interesting account 
of the country, its attractions and resources. Mr. Hallock took the first train in 
from the end of the track at O'Fallon's creek, Mrs. Hallock being the first lady 
passenger on the new extension. 

Mr. Hallock says that from Fort Custer, north to Stillwater, a distance of 
about one hundred miles, there are many settlers, and on some portions of the 
bottom, where there is plenty of wood and water, one is hardly out of sight of 
fences for twenty miles on a stretch." 

In 1882 I was up Regina, Sascatchewan territory, near the terminus of the 
new Canadian Pacific R. R., and a string of Red river carts brought in sacks of 
pemmican for sale. That was the very last buffalo meat ever made into pemmican 
south of the Peace river. 

Some considerable time afterwards, I think it was in 1885, I got an order 
from Wm. T. Hornaday (then of the Smithsonian) to put him. on some fine 
game. But all we could find was half a dozen dingy old bulls in Montana dusting 
themselves on the top of a mound. They were tearing their hair from grief. 

To hark back quite a bit. After the rifle match was won at Creedmoor, Brook- 
lyn, N. Y., between the Irish and Americans, with Major Arthur B. Leach and 



50 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

General Geo. W. Wingate in their respective cominiand of elevens, I took tive of 
the Irish team down to the Nation (Indian Territory then, but now Oklahoma, and 
the rest of the world), and picked up a good manager, George H. Dorman, at 
Hannibal, on the Missouri, and a couple of good guides at Chetopah, on the 
Kansas line, and started for Cabin creek with Capt. Case and Bill Orme after deer. 
We had been sidetracked from the "M. K. and T." at Shell City, Mo., after quail 
and sage hens and others. We stopped over with Mr. O. Duck, but market gunners 
were not after him. John Rigby, the Dublin gun maker, and Joe Milner, the home 
stretcher at the 1,000-yard target, are now the only survivors of that party of 
thirteen, at 75 and 80 years of age. While we waited two days at Chetopah a 
painted gang of Cherokees rode into town and shot up the saloons at the railway 
station, and made all passengers in the waiting room kneel down and say their 
prayers. My riflemen from old Ireland galloped down from the town and ran 
them ofif quick. While we were hunting deer among the swales of the rolling 
prairie a big buck was hit, which ran two miles at least before he fell, and 
although the hunters followed him on horseback, the buzzards had his eyes and 
entrails out before they could reach him.. They actually began to tear him while 
he was yet alive. The carcass was black with the birds when the hunters came up ; 
and the air was filled with hundreds, and more constantly arriving from all direc- 
tions, although up to the moment of the fatal shot two or three only could be seen 
aloft lazily quartering the sky. Perhaps the most mysterious feature of the whole 
occurrence was that the birds should detect the predicament of the deer the 
instant he was fatally wounded, and so follow him' to the death; and not only the 
two or three birds of the vicinity, but the hundreds farther off and remote, who 
must have either observed the deer from their distant points of view, or else noted 
the unusual stir and direction of flight of their fellow buzzards. In either case, 
the evidence is specially conclusive that they were keenly on the alert, and that 
nothing within their scope of vision, however trifling, escaped their notice. 

By this time the frontier army posts and forts were beginning to fill up with 
Indian captives, and down at Fort Sill Interpreter Jones gave me a large number 
of Comanche photos, which I sold to the U. S. Government— since 1900^ — for James 
Mooney to use in writing up the wild Indians as they were. I have a couple of 
large Prang's lithographs in glass and gilt frames in the ethnological gallery of our 
new U, S. Museum, which shows two old trappers of the plains on horseback 
covering their packs of furs from being captured by ten mounted Indians who 
try to stampede their horses by shaking blankets, yelling and letting arrows fly. 
They had no guns in those days and the trappers stood them off with their rifles. 
In 1877 Capt. R. R. Pratt and Interpreter G. F. Fox had Crazy Horse and his 
family and some seventy Southwest Apaches and Comanches at Ft. Marion, St. 
Augustine, in uniform. The smallest Indian, at the tail of the line, was named 
"Matches," and he was a smart, cheerful match for any of them. He gave a little 
by-play in the plaza and could shoot arrows and keep six in the air at once by 
quick dexterity. My venturing among the wild redskins in the reservations was 
a hazard in the seventies. But I could enjoy the association of Micmacs, Malicetes 
and Mohawks at random* in Canada, who furnished good voyageurs and bois du 
coureurs for salmon fishers and moose hunters. While sitting in my office in 
New York my first year Dr. W. F. Carver dropped in fresh from Dakota, where 
he was born, and shot an Indian arrow into my ceiling overhead to show me how 
he could shoot a buffalo through the heart on a run. Soon after he and A. Hi 
Bogardus had some by-play before the public, shooting glass balls, and Buffalo 
Bill put up his. first big show at Evastina, Staten Island. Those were great events. 




DR. W. F. CARN'ER. 



LITERARY WORK AND TRAVEL. 51 

A little before that I was up at St. Regis lake, in the Adirondacks, with H. 
Polhemus, of Brooklyn, to see him stake out a sportsmen's hotel for Apollo Smith, 
who is alive yet and frisky at 8() odd. That time I met Mrs. W. H. H. Murray, with 
"Adirondack Murray." They had a camp of their own at Raquette lake. She 
talked me down for shootingi my .■22 at her pet duck, which was paddling 
about the edge of the water in front. I mistook it for a wild widgeon. When I 
saw her husband in after years it was at Boston, Montreal and the Guadalupe 
mountains in Texas, where he was raising horses. 

Your venerable correspondent, "Almo," tells in your last number (Sportsmen's 
Review) the most wonderful fishing story I ever read of a two and a half hours 
he and a dog spent in the Scotland highlands in landing a great salmon when 
he was a yoimgster. But I have the photo of a boy of twelve who caught a large 
Otsego bass by his nose in New York state in the 70's while looking over the 
side of the boat into the water. The bass jumped for it and the boy held on 
until he had him lifted over the gunwale. He was badly lacerated by its jaws. 
I do not recall the names of the fishing party. 

In 1879 the Englisih cricketers had great contests at Staten Island, N. Y., and 
when their secretary, Edwin Brown, was about to return to England with Richard 
Daft and his party he wrote a compliment to my assistant, Frank Satterthwaite, 
for cultivating the trans-Atlantic game in this country. He expressed an intense 
wish for the success of "Forest and Stream." 

Right here may be a good place to correct another prevalent error regarding 
the fireproof quality of the salamander, which 'both ancient and modern literature 
have represented as being able to withstand a degree of heat which would quickly 
prove fatal to any other form of life. Yet there is something in the fire tradition. 
I have had myself the most positive ocular evidence that this interesting species 
of lizard could walk right into fire and not be burned. But my eyes deceived me. 
This tiny creature, we know, like all of its kind, is able tO' adapt its color to its 
environment; and when in the precincts of a charcoal burner in the Tennessee 
mountains, I saw one of them assume a scarlet hue and walk right into the 
cincture of white ashes which bordered the red-hot coal's of the woodkiln, I felt 
convinced that truth had come to the support of allegory and tradition. (Mind, 
I have not said that I saw him walk into the flame.) However, to be positive, 
where such momentous issues were at stake, I poked the place where the lizard 
went in, and almost instantly ousted' him out, alive and active. Like the three 
Israelites in Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace, there was no smell of fire on its 
cuticle. It then occurred to me to test the temperature of its ash-bed with my 
bare finger, and I found it quite tolerable, and not at all disagreeable on a frosty 
morning up in the mountains. It was certainly a secure hiding-place from almost 
any other creature than an inquisitive naturalist. It was the last place where one 
would think of looking for anything but a roast. 

Half a century ago I was a guest of the Messrs. Russell at the Russell 
House on Palace street. Both were great salmon fishermen. One had a spliced 
ash rod 18 feet long, in two parts, which became mine by gift. Not very many 
of my friends of those days are now to be found in Quebec. Sir James LeMoine, 
however, is one and Mr. John S. Budden was another. Both are S'till alive in the 
age of 86, and they write their names to am.anuensis letters. Mr. Buden became 
very intimate with Messrs J. U. Gregory, Geo. M. Fairchild, Jr., E. T. D. Cham- 
bers, W. C. Hall, Walter Moodie and Col. Rhodes, and with them he fished most 
of the accessible waters of the district of Quebec. 



62 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Dr. Elliott Coues, assistant surgeon general U. S. A., secretary of the Hayden 
survey, and naturalist to the United States government, is well known in libraries. 
Coues and I were co-workers in the Labrador expedition in 1861, when his labors 
were first begun, and helped him jerk his Puffins out of their holes and reach with 
my rifle some specimens beyond the reach of his shotgun. I have always felt 
cause for gratitude that we were not all poisoned by the arsenic he used in 
making skins. For the skins went to his collection and the carcasses into the 
g-alley pot invariablj-. 

Did I ever see a bear ? Oh, yes ! Many scores, of size and color. Ever kill 
one? Not exactly; but Jack Stewart killed one for me among the huckleberry 
bushes on Grand Lake Island, in Maine, in 1859. We traced his tracks on the sand 
bottom across from the main land to the island, and stalked him in parallel lines 
up the island, keeping each other within sight of the water space. Jack jumped 
him at his noon siesta after his feast, and shot him with his .38 revolver. Then 
he took off his hide and gave me a two-ounce vial of his oil with my .32 
as a voucher of my prestige. But I have seen many others in my backwoods 
rambles in Alaska, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Montana, Minnesota, New York and 
the Maritime Provinces, and I have owned and raised quite a few cubs, black 
and cinnamon. Some seventeen years ago, when I was in the Catskills, I domiciled 
with John W. Rusk, hunter and photographer, at Haines Falls, and we stalked 
the North mountain quite considerable for grouse and bob-cats. We saw their 
tracks by the springs', and occasionally a black bear showed himself to us when we 
were wading a trout stream, fishing. John used to set a fourteen-pound trap at 
the garbage pile, half a mile back of the Kaaterskill Hotel, and got one almost 
every time. He would make a contract with the young sportsmen at Sunset 
Park and neighboring resorts to get them a bear for fifteen dollars ; they to have 
the hide and carcass. It was a good snap for the fellows, and the three of us 
would start off for the North mountain, where there are bob-cats and other 
varmints, and after a search through the woods, swing around to the garbage pile, 
and at the right moment John would point out the bear and let the man shoot. 
Of course the trick transpired at once, but the victim never let on; and so the 
gamie was repeated, ad captandum, and every young hunter vaunted his prowess 
and exhibited bear oil, hide and claws as trophies. 

The most sanguinary story to my recollection was the tearing to pieces of 
the hunter whose cabin was near Fort McGuiniss, Wyoming. Briefly, he had shot 
a buffalo from his doorway, but before he could get oft' the hide a she grizzly 
with two half-grown cubs almost killed him while he was skinning. He fought 
them all to their death with his sheath knife, because he had left his rifle in 
his cabin. 



CHAPTER IX. 



PARK REGION OF MINNESOTA. 



On the line of the Northern Pacific Railway, away up on the western edge 
of the inimitable Park region of Minnesota, in Becker county, lies Detroit Lake, 
a delectable body of water, with thirty-seven miles of irregular short line, filled 
with game fish. It is the central gem of 237 associated lakes, all lying in the same 
county; a galaxy of pure and limpid reservoirs, only made possible by the 
impetuous spasms of the glacial period. 

* Thirty-seven years ago, when this magnificent transcontinental railway was 
pushing its toilsome and uncertain course toward the Pacific Ocean, wholly uncon- 
scious of the natural wonders before it which the coming years were to unfold, 
an eastern gentleman of sagacious forecast, who had looked the country over, 
named Detroit Lake as the future lacustrine resort of the Northwest, predicting 
the day to be not distant when those who loved nature better than the behests of 
fashion would flock to this region as their predecessors had thronged the Adiron- 
dacks when all its attractions were primitive. He located a home for himself on 
the chosen spot, and the lapse of time has brought his prediction to the front. 
Comfortable hostelries, with every modern appointment and every luxury of the 
table, receive hundreds of summer guests. The bounty of the forests and the 
lakes is poured into their steward's laps with ever changing profusion, and all 
those accessories of boats, pavilions, music, livery, lawn and indoor games, which 
make a watering place continually enjoyable, are provided with the same open- 
handed beneficence which characterizes their domestic economy. Guests who 
sojourn here find the comforts of home without its cares; a reprieve from toil, 
and an indulgence whose exercise is grateful and compensating. Appreciating the 
advantages of a juxtaposition of town and county — for Detroit City is a county 
seat" with a population of fifteen hundred — visitors have built cottages and villas 
along the lake shore ; clubs with memberships culled from various distant cities 
have cosy sites on bluffs along the shores. Fleets of row boats, sail boats and 
naphtha launches enliven the broad expanse of water, and daily picnics make its 
confines merry. 

There is a delightful carriage drive around the entire lake, which is for the 
most part shaded, and lateral roads ramify at intervals to adjacent lakes and wind 
through alternate groves and prairie, and undulating farm lands, neatly fenced and 
radiant with the promise of the harvest. The whole landscape is aglow with 
verdure and vocal with notes of birds and parti-colored insects. It is odorous 
with summer perfume. The sunlit ripples sparkle between the flecking silhouette 
of leaves and fill the view with constant surprises, such as metropolitan treasurers 
have appropriated millions of money to imitate or reproduce in urban parks. 
Surely it is difficult to express or enumerate the charms of this rare Minnesota 
Interlaken ! I have looked the entire continent almost over, and am free to say 
that, for a country devoid of mountain features, and partaking purely of the 
pastoral, I have found none to equal this in beauty and ever-changing variety. 
The very contour of the land makes this possible. 

Consider ! This is the center of the great reservoir system which supplies some 

(53) 



54 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

of the North have their common sources. So close together, and so near akin by 
fluvial births, that the deities of the woods have always marveled why they turned 
their backs to each other and took opposite directions, one to the freezing Arctic, 
and the other to the tepid, sun-kissed waters of the South Atlantic. In the very 
cradle of these variant temperaments and erratic moods, in this sylvan nursery of 
flippant streams, we find a congregation of lakes and feeders so numerous that they 
are hardly named or numbered. The state geologist enumerates ten thousand. 
In aggregation and arrangement they seem the very counterpart oi the galaxy 
across the sky. There are lakes of every conceivable conformation and outline: 
round lakes with pebbly shores; oblong lakes margined with wild rice and reeds; 
lakes spangled with pond lily pods in June ; lakes with deeply indented bays and 
projecting points half submerged and bristling with rushes; lakes with shores 
wooded to the brink and filled with wooded islands ; lakes with flat shores, bold 
shores, sloping shores, lakes with confronting bluffs and promontories. There 
are lakes detached and isolated ; lonesome lakes ; lakes in clusters and in pairs ; 
.spectacle lakes and lakes in connecting chains, stretching far across the country, 
and forming uninterrupted thoroughfares for boats and canoes for a hundred 
miles or more. 

These chains of lakes constitute the chief charm of the Park Region. The 
same feature makes the Adirondacks fascinating. I should say, it made them 
fascinating years ago, when the whole tract was free to random footsteps set 
thitherward, but measurably restricted now. 

An active temperament tires of the monotony of a fixed cottage by the side 
of an individual lake, with the diurnal row, the bath, and the still fishing, the 
hammock and the book, and the protracted lullaby of idleness and loafing. It 
loves to spread its wings and launch out into the unseen and unknown, expectant 
fit every sharp curve of the sinuous river, emerging from the umbrageous covert 
of the forest into the broad expanse of a far-reaching lake, swinging the oars with 
a long stoke across its bosom; seeking an outlet where the rushes conceal it, and 
camping, perchance, where night overtakes, with the veil drawn tightly over the 
uncertainties of tomorrow. It is only the agnostic who is truly happy, that is, 
if he appreciates the good gifts of the Great Giver through whom alone he is 
manifested, or ever can be. What would it satisfy or profit to be omniscient? 
Dare any one declare that the lapse from time into eternity will vouchsafe a 
perfect and comprehensive revelation? or that the pursuit of knowledge will ever 
reach an ultimate fullness of that which is knowable? And if it were attainable, 
v.'ho can say that lethargy would not follow repetition, as surfeit overcomes the 
anaconda? 

Now the wilderness attracts most when it is presented in new and constantly 
varying aspects; and it was because the Rev. Adirondack Murray was able to so 
present it that he drew after him a large and enthused following. He did not 
daze the novice by turning all at once upon his unaccustomed eyes the full 
effulgence of the sportsman's paradise, but he opened momentary vistas towards 
the light of truth and read aloud the simple narrative of personal experience and 
impressions which touched a sympathetic chord in the hearts of his listeners, and 
it aroused a latent impulse, and provided a new sensation for those who had 
become surfeited with the perfunctory sound of watering-place festivities. 

Already the itineraries of the Park Region of Minnesota are as well defined 
and substantially fixed as are those of the Adirondacks. Tourists encounter 
tourists in their incoming and outgoing by lake and river ; the whole territory is 
alive with boats and guides, and the welkin rings with the clarion laughter of 



PARK REGION OF MINNESOTA. 55 

liealthy women and hearty children, who, thank goodness, live to leaven the soggy, 
half-baked sodality of jcunesse doree who would incontinently frown them out. 
Therefore let the true disciples of the rod and gun, and the women with the sun 
hats and bloomers go up and possess the land forthwith. All the lakes are filled 
with fish in variety astonishing. There are pike, pickerel, pike-perch muscallonge, 
black bass, silver bass, rock bass, calico bass, striped bass, white and yellow perch, 
croppies, sheeps heads, suckers, red horse, sunfish, stem-winders, bullheads, white- 
fish, sturgeon, and that rare variety of coregonus termed tuUibee. And, blessed 
be the fact! the domain is free, not hedged in like most of the rugged wilderness 
regions of the west and east. Ah, my comrades with the blanching hair ^ where 
rtre the haunts of our youth? What pleasures of angling we have had in the 
preterit ! and whither shall we look in the future unless it be to the Land o' Lakes ! 
An echo comes out from the glens of the Adirondacks: "Are they not all pre- 
served?" and iteration booms forth from the Laurentian watershed : "Are we not 
preserved?" Well, yes ; quite so. So are finnan baddies and salt mackerel. Along 
the high crags and in the deep glens I read everywhere the posted notices : "No 
trespassing," "No fishing here," and I find that vast areas have been made exclusive 
by law, and that the rich have forged the flat. All along the pathless woods where 
moccasin tread scarce disturbs the deer, I see the placards as flamboyant as. the 
signs of Mandrake Pills and Schenck's Bitters in New Jersey, proclaiming that 
only the lord of the manor is entitled to fish or hunt on the forty-mile tract which 
he has sequestrated, and that this gilt-edged club of ten has vast territorial rights 
which are beyond encroachment; and I see no open vista through which a hopeful 
ray of light protrudes for impecunious toilers, who anticipate for eleven weary 
months the fruitless outing assigned to the twelfth. And all the Populist legisla- 
tures, which form like fungi on the body politic, can bring no remedy, or do more 
than voice the popular discontent. So I reflect and ask : "What is the perhaps 
vulgar but very numerous public eventually to do for its fishing?" Must it forego 
its inherent birthright as a community and crush out its instinct? Where are the 
ninety and nine to go when every known place is pre-empted by the rich? 

* Last fall I was up on the White Earth Indian Reservation, twenty-five miles 
north of Detroit. Twenty-five hundred red men domiciliate there, where they 
cultivate small farms and the rudimental amenities of civilization. It is a regal 
domain, heavily timbered, with much morass and tangle interspersed. Like the 
"Black Forest" of Germany, it is sequestrated to the lords regnant and harbors 
many deer and bear, with millions of wild fowl and small game. Mallards, wood 
ducks, and some other varieties breed abundantly. Otters, minks, muskrats, cranes, 
herons, buzzards, hawks, ospreys, squirrels, timber-grouse, hedgehogs and gray 
rabbits are there and propagate. By invitation of a resident, the visitor may hunt, 
but not otherwise, unless he marries into the tribe and becomes a squaw man ; so 
that the game is hardly worth the candle. Taking a redskin from this section, who 
had wandered down to Detroit with some roots, skins and small wares to sell, we 
paddled down the chain of lakes to Fergus Falls, fishing the outlets for black bass, 
and took the Great Northern Railroad at that point for return. One day the 
scamp served a bold osprey a shabby trick by transfixing a fish with a spike to a 
square board and setting it adrift. Then the osprey dropped down on the bait 
with a whack, and immolated himself on tJie point of the spike. Injun big medi- 
cine — wagh ! 



* The foregoing chapter was written sixteen years ago, by Mr. Charles Hallock, and is as 
interesting now as then. — Editor. 



CHAPTER X. 



THE UNDINE FISHING PARTY UNDER FIRE. 

When the Undine fishing party started up the Chicago & Northwestern Rail- 
road from the Twin Cities, the day was not more ominous of direful conflagration 
*^han any previous day had been for months. During all that fervid summer of 
1894, from May until September, the atmosphere had been murky with smoke so 
that it was difficult to see or breathe, and the constant solar heat made it still more 
oppressive. All day long, from week to week, the lurid sun glared down through 
the smudgy vapor like a redhot bull's eye upon the parched and gasping earth. 
No rain fell, leaves and grass curled up with drouth, springs failed, rivers ran dry, 
and farmers said such a long dry spell had never been known before in Wisconsin. 
Occasionally a grateful zephyr would mitigate the fervent heat and clear the 
air a little, but in general an unremitting calm prevailed from day to day, dead 
and stifling as the interior of a bake-oven. Persons who had been up the road 
asserted that the smoke came from forest fires two hundred miles away, which 
had got into the muskegs or peat bogs, and were bound to burn; that large areas 
were burning, and unless rain came speedily the whole forest would be consumed. 
Already large gangs of mill men and farm hands were out fighting fire, and some 
houses and live stock had been destroyed. But the half-baked denizens of the 
towns who were gasping for relief remembered only the refreshing coolness of 
the sequestered lakes in that far-off wilderness where they had sestivated the year 
before, and chafed for its delights. They could not realize that their anticipated 
refuge was the very seat and source of present misery, and so those who were 
able to flee the town hastend northward like joyous moths toward the candle 
flame; and the fast train bore them on, while the anglers aboard selected flies for 
seductive casts and counted in their minds the scores of gamey bass, trout and 
muskalonge which should come to their hands after they reached the delectable 
land of lakes. 

Just here it is necessary to interpolate, for intelligent comprehension of the 
situation, that the ramifications of the Chicago & Northwestern system spread 
over one-third of the great pine region of North Wisconsin, giving easy access 
to at least thirty trout streams and innumerable lakes with comfortable hostelries 
at easy intervals, which one can patronize when he does not wish to camp. Some 
of the lakes are broad and sparkling like inland seas, lying close to the railroad 
track. Upon others, hidden in the depths of the forest, sunlight never falls except 
at summer noon. With a portable canvas boat and a guide one can reach most 
all of them by logging roads, and with a little effort and some endurance of black 
flies, mosquitoes, deer flies, wood ticks and flies, gnats and midgets, fish in waters 
which even now are virgin; for the physical character of Northern Wisconsin 
is such that a moiety of it will remaiii for half a century at least as much of a 
jungle as the Florida everglades, to which the country bears some small resem- 
blance in respect to alternate hummocks and swamps, grass meadows and high pine 
ridges. 

I remember well, a dozen years ago, how the lumbermen and sportsmen 
rejoiced when this same railroad made its bold push northward to Lake Superior 

(56) 



THE UNDINE FISHING PARTY UNDER FIRE. 57 

and let in the light of the western sun upon the gloomy tamarack swamps and 
the thickets of balsam, which had grown up in the impenetrable shade; and how, 
through the open vistas, the sheen of nameless lakes, whose existence had not 
even been suspected, burst forth unexpectedly, here and there, like the glory of 
new constellations. Innumerable streams leaped out of the secluded recesses with 
joyous bounds, and crossed the surveyor's lines, sparkling in the sun. All the 
waters seemed alive wfth fish anxious to be hooked, and even the timorous deer 
waltzed forth into the unwonted sunshine and threw up their heels in the enjoy- 
ment of a new sensation. Such an abundantly stocked preserve was never found 
before. Such multitudes of deer roamed in the forests! Such countless myriads 
of trout filled the ice-cold streams! Such monster muskalonge ploughed the 
lacustrine depths like submarine torpedoes. Multitudes of moose paths were dis- 
closed, and elaborate dams built by beavers, old Indian trails in use for centuries, 
clandestine war paths long hidden by the bush, windfalls marking the tracks of 
unrecorded cyclones, frames of abandoned tepees with the litter of former occu- 
pation strewn about. 

Since then gun and axe have made much havoc. But enough game yet 
remains for reasonable sport, and as many giant muskalonge are annually towed 
out of the inky depths as there ever were. The black bass are just as sportive 
and quite as numerous, and anglers who make this their favorite resort are seldom 
persuaded to try elsewhere. As for bears and deer the fires I am to write about 
routed out far more than were supposed to be in the covers. They appeared by 
hundreds. 

August and September are the months preferred by anglers for lake fishing. 
The bloom has then passed off, flies have gone and the fish bite better altogether. 
Probably five hundred anglers were on the Wisconsin lakes when the memorable 
conflagration culminated on September 1, wiping out expansive areas of forest 
and licking up towns and villages like straw. In Minnesota the destruction was 
fourfold greater than in Wisconsin, especially in respect to loss of life; neverthe- 
less, fifty-four houses were burned at Shell Lake, the immense lumber plant at 
Baronette Lake was entirely wiped out, and scores of mills and dwellings which 
were scattered over the country were consumed. The beleaguered inhabitants 
fought fire for a fortnight before the dread climax came, and when they could 
hold out no longer relief trains came to their rescue, running the gauntlet of the 
flames, and carried them to places of safety. Train No. 91 took 400 refugees from 
Shell Lake to Spooner, and N.o. 61 made two trips through the fire to Rice Lake, 
saving many. It was an awful experience. 

When the Undine five were put down at Bashaw Lake in the afternoon it 
was not without misgivings that they saw the train depart. A vague foreboding 
of evil oppressed them, and the tent poles were not set up with the hilarity which 
usually attends the first steps of an outing. From above the dense umbrage ot 
pine forest lying toward the west a volume of blue and white smoke rose upright 
into the air like a pillar of cloud, apparently not half a dozen miles away. Here 
and there on the visible horizon other masses of rising smoke indicated where 
smouldering or quiescent fires were insidiously eating their way into the precious 
timber. The atmosphere was stifling and intensely hot ; pungent with resinous 
fumes. Numerous birds were flitting over the waters on uneasy wings, and such 
>mall creatures as were moving acted in an uncanny way. The meteorological 
condition was little changed from the summer normal — namely, a fixed calm, 
with a leaden sky mottled with fleecy exhalations from the burning forests, through 



68 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

which the sun gleamed just now with a paUid, ominous light, as if eclipsed. The 
presages, presumably, were akin to those which hung over Pompeii before the 
ashes fell. Suddenly, without other premonition, the wind rose perceptibly, and 
the tops of the pine forest abreast of the track began to sway with a whirr which 
whispered of evil. It was the first stiff breeze that had blown for weeks, and it 
came with a puff, hot as a simoon. Almost instantly the volume of smoke which 
had so long hung like a pall in the west disappeared, and an intense crim^son 
flush suffused the whole quarter, visible high above the tallest trees ; and then in 
a jiffy the breeze freshened to a gale, and the gale developed into a hurricane, and 
vhe whole air at once seemed serried with darts and arrows of flame. Trees 
bowed and bent half double, and balls of fire rolled off their fronds and dropped 
hissing hot into the lake. The whole firmament was ablaze and resonant with 
uproar. 

Such an instantaneous change from quiescent mood to wild resorts and devasta- 
tion was never experienced since the fateful days of Sodom, Every cheek 
blanched, and a wail arose from a quintette of white lips : 

"Great heavens ! we are lost !" 

The anglers did not then know it, but the terrible blast which they were 
experiencing was but the outer verge of the great cyclone which was at that 
moment wiping out the town of Hinckley, in Minnesota, seventy miles due west. 
Fortunately it continued but a few minutes and then lulled. The respite was 
grateful, for the heat was insupportable, even under the blessed wind-break which 
sheltered them. In the brief interval, however, a startling transformation was 
wrought in the landscape, and singular results followed. It was discovered that 
the forest was by this time ablaze on both sides of the lake, leaving the devoted 
party literally hemmed in between the two fires. At first thought, the situation 
seemed to augur sure death by cremation, but old Bert, the guide, who was with 
them, demonstrated quite to their comfort of mind that the main fire which had 
been burning for weeks past just west of the lake had divided, as it is often known 
to do in prairie and woodland conflagrations, and left a wedge-like area of 
imburned forest, which, though not exempt from ultimate destruction, would for 
the present burn but slowly on the lateral edges ; so that the party might eventually 
find safety by crossing the lake after the fire had swept past, provided they could 
only keep from being baked or roasted in the interim. Their situation was very 
much like that of a Thanksgiving turkey in an old-fashioned tin oven. 

After a brief lull the tempest rose again as violently as before, and thereafter, 
for two agonizing hours, there followed intermittent gusts and lulls. Great 
surges of flame would fill the air for a time, swooping down on the lake with the 
rush of demons, while pennants of fire streamed "out from the tops of the pines 
and masses of blazing matter hurtled like missiles over a battle field. Then all 
would be still again, involving awful suspense, with direful explosions in the air, 
pyrotechnics and rings of fire. Meanwhile large numbers of deer were seen to 
emerge from the forest and plunge into the lake, single and two or three together, 
swallowing the water in great gulps. Some bears, too, came in. Multitudes of 
birds fluttered over its surface, and collections of small animals and myriads of 
insects gathered on the cleared space between the forest and the shore. Occa- 
sionally an eagle, with languid beat of wings, would come soaring before the 
advancing flames, and once a poor, unfortunate which was just able to reach the 
top of a tall, unscathed rampike was seen to cling to it for an instant and then 
topple over, exhausted, into the abyss below. Least expected of all was the egress 



THE UNDINE FISHING PARTY UNDER FIRE. 59 

of two Ojibway Indians from the fringe of forest who shuffled down to the 
margin of the lake, where they drank inordinately. Then, soaking their blankets 
rn the refreshing fluid, they wrapped them about their heads and shoulders and 
sat down, with their legs in the lake. Taking the hint, the fishing party were 
quick to follow suit, and there they sat for the remainder of two mortal hours of 
dread and suffering, uncertain of the end, when, fortunately, the hurricane spent 
its force and the fire had accomplished its greatest mischief. 

The following morning, as soon as the glowing embers had cooled sufficiently 
to permit a passage, a train came through and picked the anglers up, blistered and 
half blind. Their departure was like a release from Hades. Oh ! that blessed 
minister of deliverance! And rain came, too, not long afterward. In the torrid 
cities the weather bureau had foretold its occurrence and one could almost hear 
the patter of its advancing mercy as it hastened from the west. Hundreds of 
stricken and dying creatures were panting for its blessed relief, and finally it came, 
cool and beneficent, stirring the drooping leaves and filling the distressed fields 
and homes with refreshment and good cheer. Then followed a copious deluge 
which drenched the kindling faggots all over the burned district, preventing the 
spreading of the fire, and when the next rosy dawn flushed the breaking day, lo ! 
the streams were swollen and turbid, and water stood ankle deep in the hollows 
of the meadow-s and ploughed fields. 



CHAPTER XI. 

RANDOM CASTS IN THE LAND OF LAKES. 

The state of Minnesota is so emphatically the land of lakes that this designa- 
tion should become peculiarly its own. No other region of the globe can compare 
with it in this respect. In its central portion the greater area is water. The 
known number of lakes is seven thousand, and an estimate of its unnamed and 
unexplored lakes adds half as many more at least ! I remember to have sent you 
a year ago or more an enumeration of the larger number, given by counties. 

As Commissioner of the Department of Lakes and Summer Resorts, repre- 
sented at the New Orleans exposition last winter, it came within my province to 
visit no less than fifty-eight of the counties in this state, and this duty has made 
me familiar with their physical features. In the "Park Region," now easily 
acsessible by the St. Paul and Manitoba Railroad, where the lakes are most 
numerous, I have been interested in noting the many pairs of lakes — considerable 
bodies of water separated by narrow strips of land which are often a mile or more 
in length. Some of these are mere causeways, like a railroad embankment, wide 
enough for two carriages to pass abreast, while others are studded with oak trees 
of many years' growth, contributing much to the sylvan beauty of the landscape. 
These causeways invariably unite what were originally projecting points of land in 
an individual lake. It is a peculiarity of nearly all the larger lakes that, wherever 
there is a point, a bar makes out, dropping down at the end into deep water. 
These bars are sometimes wholly of sand, but the submerged portions are usually 
made up of round boulders. In the deep water are the best fishing places for black 
bass in mid-summer. I suppose these bars are formed mainlv in early spring by 
shoves of ice, assisted at various times by wave action. I notice that the shores of 
many lakes are encircled by a narrow embankment or ridge some three feet higher 
than the land behind it, and these are being continually enlarged by storms and 
movements of ice. I have found many of these ridges bordering meadows and on 
high ground in the midst of growing timber, indicating shore lines of ancient 
lakes, which existed at a time when a larger portion of the country was submerged 
than now. Geological inference easily accounts for such formations, but they are 
often puzzling to the uninformed. 

The distribution of fish throughout these lakes is very interesting. The pickerel 
everywhere prevail. Bass' are found within a large but circumscribed area, of 
which the greater part lies east of the Mississippi River. In the northeastern lakeSj 
east and north of the St. Louis River, lake trout are found, notably, and I don't 
know but exclusively, in the three extensive counties which border Lake Superior. 
The great northern pike and the mascalonge are found in many of the lakes in 
.company with the black bass.. Wall-eyed pike are even more widely distributed 
than the black bass, but far less so than the pickerel. In Cook County Mr. John 
M. Miller, the county auditor, informs me that there is a variety of white bass 
speckled blue, but I have not seen it myself. It is caught in a lake in Range 5, west 

Referring to the weekly records of big catches which are printed in the 
American Angler, I confess to a feeling of something like disgust whenever I read 

(60) 



RANDOM CASTS IN THE LAND OF LAKES. 61 

them. In the name of Izaak, what is the use of catching so many fish as the 
majority of anglers aspire to do? Does the record of great counts establish one's 
title to superiority as an angler? Does it prove anything more than a super- 
abundance of fish? I know that these boat-loads are captured by main strength 
and not by delicate manipulation, because ten minutes is little enough time to land a 
heavy fish on fine tackle. Six fish an hour for four hours' morning fishing and two 
hours' evening fishing — thirty-six fish — is a splendid score, and all that ought ever 
to come to a reasonable man's boat or basket. Just think of the labor and finesse 
involved in the feat, especially in a tideway at an outlet, where the current is 
strong ! 

Within the past five years the Brule River, near Bayfield, Wisconsin, has come 
into prominent notice as a trout stream, and since the Northern Pacific and the 
St. Paul and Omaha Railroads have extended their lines almost to the river's brink, 
making the journey easy and short, anglers are flocking to it by scores. I think 
the river is one hundred and fifteen miles long. It is a marvelous river, and 1 
know of no water in the world which is so abundantly stocked with trout. It 
fairly teems with them. Where it debouches into Lake Superior its mouth is broad, 
and in June the big four-pound trout come cruising along the rocky shore from 
far and wide and are caught without stint. Tens of thousands of very large trout 
are taken from the Brule along the entire stream every year, and I cannot imagine 
how it is kept from depletion except by annual accessions from the great lake. It 
is no uncommon thing for a couple of anglers to report one thousand trout as the 
result of three or four days' fishing! Now what is the use? Couldn't they be 
content with enough to eat and a quantum suff to bring away? What becomes of 
the first day's catch? "Ask of the winds," etc. Only the take of the last day will 
be fresh enough to fetch home. 

But I can tell yoti of something worse than this— of men who seine the lakes 
of fish and feed the product to their hogs! Why cannot men learn to be provi- 
dent of good gifts and considerate of other people to come after them? 

During the month past nearly all the lakes have been "in bloom." When they 
are in this condition the fishing is slack. The bloom is the suspended seed of 
aquatic plants, which are disseminated everywhere, and finally become water soakefl 
and sink to take root and reproduce. There are different kinds of seed, and, like 
the seeds of land plants, they do not all bloom at once, so that some lakes are 
clear at the time when others are "working." My impression is that the fish eat 
large quantities of them, and, becoming surfeited thereby, decline to bite the 
anglers' baits. I doubt if the seed has any deleterious effect upon their gills. It 
is in a sense a protection to them at a period when many kinds of fish are recupe- 
rating after spawning. It is a protection also to the young fry. The water is 
thick and partially hides them from their predatory enemies. There is nothing 
noxious about the water when it is in bloom, though it has been stated that 
cattle have been made ill by drinking it. A strong microscope will assist the 
student in his investigation of this phenomenon. 

There is a fish quite common in the lakes of Minnesota and Wisconsin, called 
the sheepshead (Haploidonotus grunniens), which is not generally recognized and 
not often caught. In some waters I have found it quite palatable, and in others 
it is quite the reverse. They are not usually esteemed for food in waters east of 
the Mississippi, but I find the, Minnesota article make an excellent boiled dish or 
chowder. The sheepshead are the only submarine musicians we have in the West, 



62 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

and in some localities are vulgarly yclept "grunts" by those who call themselves 
good judges o£ music. 

I notice by the Bismarck Journal that a man named Harmonie has started out 
alone from Livingston, on the Yellowstone, to make a canoe voyage to New 
Orleans. It is easy enough to start, but not so easy to get through. The Yellow- 
stone above Glendive is filled with wicked rapids and is the most dangerous part of 
the cruise. Men often run the Yellowstone in suitable boats, and many are drowned 
every year, notwithstanding. There is a gentleman here at Lake Minnetonka, a 
professional oarsman and boat-builder, named Capt. John B. Brooks, formerly of 
New Haven, Conn., who ran from Livingston to a point in Iowa, but his name 
would carry him through where others would fail. He came down in a fifteen-foot 
boat, the latter part of the way through running ice in November, and suffered a 
great deal of hardship. He passed the worst rapids by keeping the head of the 
boat up stream and plying the oats to guide and steady her, dropping astern as 
rapidly as good judgment and circumstances permitted. 

By and by you will hear from me in Alaska, and I hope to add something novel 
to the contributed matter of the Angler. 

* Written in 18S5. 

REMINISCENCES OF BIG LAKE. 

Twenty-five years ago this month of *June I started from St. Paul with a 
prospecting party for the Red River Valley, from whose distant but now easily 
accessible precincts I am at present writing. In those days there were no stage 
coaches. There were very few houses a hundred miles north or west of the 
embryo capital of Minnesota. The Red River Trail drew out its sinuous length 
over an unexplored prairie to Pembina on the Canadian boundary, 400 miles away, 
and over this route we made our tedious and lonely journey, not without danger of 
molestation from marauding bands of Indians. Camping the first night at Big 
Lake, some twenty miles from St. Anthony Falls, we found a single settler located 
near the shore. He was sole monarch of the solitude. The lake was nearly circu- 
lar — one of those beautiful gems for which Minnesota is so famous — and its pebbly 
shores were encircled with a belt of lily pads, whose pure white blossoms breathed 
fragrance into the atmosphere like the floral wreath of a rural bride. While hunting 
for agates among the rounded stones on the margin a crank and dilapidated dugout 
was discovered among the alders, and simultaneously the plash of some sort of 
large fish on the outer rim of the pads suggested sport and its most favorable 
opportunity. 

If a person could have walked with an elfin tread over the green enamelled 
platform of those broad floating pads, he would have speedily discovered their 
glossy surfaces to be populous with the lower orders of animal creation; slippery 
green batrachians, filmy spiders, wrigglers, caddis flies, beetles, ephemeras, and a 
whole menagerie of creeping and winged insects. He would have soon learned why 
the big fish were thus patroling the outer rim of the circle and foraging along the 
border. A little scrutiny would have shown him that the lesser world of inferior 
things is like the higher realm of human existence ; that there are reckless, careless 
and self-opinionated among all classes; that many are self-willed and venturesome; 
that often, when we are in the midst of fullest enjoyment and the confidence of 
apparent security, danger lurks ; that death is hidden among the flowers and beneath 
the cloth of gold. Unwary frogs would leap from the pads into the pellucid 
depths, and awkward bugs tumble over the edgesinto the brink, hardly touching the 
surface of the water ere they were swallowed into the capacious maw of a gigantic 



RANDOM CASTS IN THE LAND OF LAKES. 63 

bass. Meanwhile their unsuspecting comrades foraged for sweets among the 
coronals and petals of the delicious lilies, and sauntered under the umbrages of the 
wax-like calices and waltzed about the shiny floors of the broadening leaves, destined, 
possibly, to pass off next into the abyss of fate. 

It w-as at the first flush of the long summer twilight which lingers far into the 
night of the northern sky, and all of our prospecting party were tired with an 
unwonted tramp, for they had not yet become hardened to the average of thirty 
miles per diem (which afterward became their regulation march). An early bed 
offered greater attractions than angling. No one had contemplated trying his luck 
until the next morning, and quite likely the most interested of the party would have 
continued to loll on the grass in camp and listlessly watch the intermittent plashes 
of the fish around the lake, had not the already heightened interest been enhanced 
and intensified by the shadowy apparition of the pioneer settler creeping through 
the brush toward the water. 

He held in his hard-fisted grip a ponderous wattle, with the tip projecting for- 
ward as he strode, and when he reached the margin of the water he waded boldly 
in among the pads up to his middle and lifting the pole with both hands slung it 
first backward over his shoulder and then forward toward the water with a mighty 
"'swish!" Some large object gleamed momentarily from the end of the transitory 
radius which his heavy line described, and cutting an impalpable perimeter in the 
air, came down upon the bosom of the lake kersivash just outside the pads'! It 
was a whole frog which he had on for bait, and its dangling legs were tremendous 
to behold The astonished spray which the blow threw up had barely time to 
reflect the crimson of the glowing west ere there was a great commotion in the 
water and a struggle for the pole ; but presently, with one mighty heave, the dougMy 
fisherman bent his inborn force and high in air another object sped brushward, 
and like a collapsed meteor fell with a sickening thud into the woods behind, far 
out of sight. A protracted investigation discovered a three-pound bass, "big-mouth" 
variety, and no mistake, for the whole frog was in it I This same unmutilated frog 
answered for a second fish, and as promptly a second fish answered to the bait. 

A repetition of this extraordinary achievement stirred the latent enthusiasm 
within my own breast and kindled the fire of the ardent angler. My tired limbs 
forgot their fatigue, but my hands and genius had not forgotten their cunning. 
Hastily rumaging through my camp kit I found a trolling spoon and line, and 
rushing down to the canoe I jumped into it and shoved out into the lake. The 
wind was blowing briskly off shore, so laying aside the paddle I let her drift 
across and paid out line as she went. The dugout was so narrow that I could not 
sit in it squarely ; but lying sideways on my hip I did the best I could, and presently 
got a thumping strike. My position was so awkward that I couldn't half see 
behind. I couldn't see my fish unless the boat was moving sideways, but I managed 
to haul in by a sort of hand- over-shoulder maneuver, and finally got him into the 
boat. I managed to get three fish in going once across the lake, and as the supply 
was ample for our breakfast 1 left the canoe on the lee shore and walked back to 
camp. 

Those were the first bass I ever caught in my life, and the sensation was over- 
powering. I don't know if Big Lake still keeps up its reputation as a fishing 
resort, but it fairly swarmed with black bass in those days, and I envy the old 
pioneer the sport which he might have had if he had only known how to make the 
most of it. 

* June, 1882. 



CHAPTER XII. 

A PERILOUS ADVENTURE AT KANAWHA FALLS.. 

I AM moved to indite a reminiscence of Kanawha Falls, covering a moment of 
fearful peril, out of which a kind and overruling providence for some wise purpose 
doubtless provided a way of escape. Even now, thirty-five years afterward, I never 
hear the roar of a cataract without associating it with the rumble of an express 
train dashing through a rock cut, and a vision of two helpless human creatures 
clinging with lacerated fingers to the excoriating side walls from which the suction 
almost tore them. 

You know there is a curvilinear cut through the marginal ledge which abuts 
the river quite within gunshot of the Falls. Well, at times, when meteriological 
conditions favor, the undertone of revolving car wheels blends so intimately with 
the resonance of the tumbling waters that the keenest sense can hardly distinguish 
ihem apart. You are aware of this fact also? It was like this, then (ora pro 
Jiobis!), on that beautiful July morning in 1876, when wife and 1 went fishing high 
up in the life-giving mountain atmosphere of the Gawley canyon, 2,000 feet above 
the level of the deep, deep sea. S'death! we didn't know it at the time, but we 
were even then "betwixt the devil and the deep sea," but of this later on. 

The inimitable guide books of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company, on 
whose picturesque trans-mountain line this wild bit of scenery is located, says in 
its mild, liquescent way : "Kanawha Falls is a pleasant and picturesque scene of 
watery waywardness. A ledge of rock thirty feet high extends the width of the 
river, and the waters tumble over it in tumultuous fury. The clear mirror-like 
basin below the falls stands in strong contrast with the foaming cataract." "Watery 
waywardness" is musical alliteration, but it is not sufficiently intensive. "Tumul- 
tuous" is correct enough, though I observed no "furj^" Much depends, I ween, 
upon the situation of the beholder, whether his canoe be careering wildly over the 
crest of the cataract, after the fashion of the love-lorn maiden in Indian legend, 
about to make the fatal plunge, or whether it be boating quietly on the "mirror-like 
basin," aforesaid, with bending rod and taut line fast to a five-pound bass hung in 
the swirl of the midway rock. Moreover, there is an expression of expansiveness 
in the half-tone illustration which is not true to nature; for one might imagine 
an illimitable horizon with ultima thule lying indefinitely beyond, whereas, really, 
the inclosing hills of the Blue Ridge drop abruptly almost to either margin, and 
the rapt beholder, sitting in his boat, looks upward to the deep blue zenith against 
which their rugged summits are ambitiously outlined, instead of far away into 
Utopian space — envying, forsooth, the flight of the water ousel, which permits the 
enjoyment of both elements alike. 

Mr. Editor, I am not apt to deal in rhapsody, or go into ecstacies over trans- 
cendent landscapes. Your stated summer correspondent, turned loose, with only a 
day off, is always enthusiastac. His descriptions of sylvan or bucolic haunts are 
therefore subject to modification. Like good beer, they are heartiest when th2y 
effervesce. But I am no adolescent out for a holiday. I have looked a large part 
of this broad continent over, and am free to say that for natural features or 
changeful aspect, none can hardly be more beautiful and more striking than those 

(64) 



A PERILOUS ADVENTURE AT KANAWHA FALLS. (55 

about Kanawha Falls. I passed a pleasant week there with Mr. Beckley, landlord, 
I think the name was, and every morning during my stay my young wife and I 
would pull our skiff from the boat-house landing up river into the spray of the 
cataract, and letting it drift into the eddies, cast deft lines at the edge of the 
swirl where the still water meets the rough ; and oh ! brethren of the angle, as 
sure as I live, the black bass which sport in the Kanawha are full of game and 
pride of life, and the water has that odorous woodsy smell which savors of the 
lotion which naiads use in their baths. The simbeams flashing on the wavelets are 
the reflection of their bright glances, I ween, and the soft summer zephyrs seem to 
waft to our mortal ears the whispers of their amours. Oh, my heart ! What a 
blessed lot it is to be a naiad! Sometimes I would look into my wife's bright 
eyes, as she sat in the stern sheets, and almost wish that we two were both naiads 
together, at home with the brook trout and shiners, and newts, and batrachians. 
and gos?amerflies, and all the other quaint creatures which populate the falls and 
the pools in the glens. Then, in a happy-go-lucky sort of way, with nothing to 
think of or fear, we might toss up the spray with our hands, and join in the 
roundelay of the opalled denizen when he exclaims : 

"I am Salmon Fontinalis, 

To the sparkling fountain born, 
And my home is where oxalis. 

Heather bell and rose adorn 
The crystal basin in the dell; 
Undine, the wood nymph, knows it well, 
That is where I lo\e to dwell." 

Yet after all, the pleasure of a summer vacation depend more upon one's 
own moods than upon environment. Nature is a potential accessory, but if we are 
gross-grained or morose, all the naiads in Undine's realm could not make us happy. 
Toads, tarantulas and blue devils would appear under every turned-up stone, nez 
f^awf 

As I was saying of the Kanawha bass : They are large and comelj-, and heavy 
of weight, and they pull on the line like the stroke oar of a Harvard crew. They 
leap, dive, plunge, sulk, sprint, gyrate and perpetrate all those perfunctory gymnas- 
tics which are set down in the fish books, not only bass, but wall-eyed pike, yclept 
jack salmon on the Allegheny slope, running sometimes to twenty pounds in 
weight, which are caught best in deep water when the wind is blowing briskly, 
with cut fiish-bait or minnow, but sometimes with gaudy fly or spoon, for they are 
capricious, both as to food and feeding grounds, seldom being found in the same 
location or depth of water. There is no better table fish when dressed off with 
a hatchet, sccundem artem, a chop at the head and a clip at the tail, two slits along 
the length of the backbone with the keen edge to take out the dorsal, a flip of the 
skin from the body like drawing off a glove, and lo ! the thing is done ! The 
entrails follow the gills and a clean chunk of boneless meat results. A Minnesota 
half-breed taught me that little trick at Detroit Lake, but I wonder how long it 
will take me to learn to do it half as well? 

The whole mountain region in this section is full of game fish. There are 
speckled trout in Cherry Creek, which flows into the Little Kanawha not far from 
Ronceverte ; in Falling Springs, Anthony's Creek, near Quinnamont, in Rawey 
County; in Lost Creek, Glade Creek and several other clear-water streams quite 
accessible from points on the railroad. Jackson's River, New River, the Green- 
briar and the Gawley harbor black bass, pickerel, perch and suckers, with Coving- 
ton, Clifton Forge, Talcott and Lowell as eligible starting points. Get off at Alder- 
son, West Virginia, and fish east to Fort Springs and west to the Greenbrier stock 



66 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

yards and you catch trout and bass. Indeed, the entire Allegheny range from 
Ronceverte to Dunlap is one continuous game preserve, abounding in deer, bears, 
turkeys, partridges, rabbits, squirrels, possums, coons and the rest, where I would 
sooner take my chances for a bag full or a back load than in Dr. Weble's or 
Austin Corbin's expensive preserves. The heart of the Alleghenies and Blue 
Ridge, with their stupendous subdivision, is almost a duplicate of the Cal^skills, but 
with more cultivation in parts and a greater diversity of products. Its canyons 
are deeper and wilder than the Cloves, and at Covington, for instance, the land- 
scape is more extended than at Haines' Falls or Hunter, with inclosing mountains 
even higher. Corn fields and log cabins alternate with princely villas and up-to-date 
hotels. Wild mountaineers with guns and pocket pistols board the trains at the 
way stations much after the fashion of cowboys in Texas, but with much better 
behavior, and the experiences of a tenderfoot are likely to be quite as racy and 
stimulating as in Wyoming if he will only drive away a few miles from the rail- 
road. All winter long, until March, there is sport for the gunner and bear hunter. 
Deer are as plenty as wolves in Montana. One party started sixteen in three days 
and got four of them, lately. Turkeys can be had for the baiting. Quails rise in 
all the pea patches and green fields. Possums swing from the sweet gums and 
'simmon trees at the full of the moon. Coons come down from their perches at 
command when treed, and sport in the forest runs free all through the winter 
months, till March. About the middle of May, when the mountain streams clear, 
trout fishing begins ; and from that time on, for nine full months succeeding, there 
is fulsome enjoyment with rod and reel. Selah. 

And now, having delivered up the keys of the fastnesses and keeps of the 
forest, I come to the pivotal part of my narrative, and relate my experiences in 
the road-cut at Kanawha Falls : 

By some strange and happy chance, we had been reading that very morning of 
an accident that had happened to an army officer and two ladies who were caught 
in a similar trap the previous day with fatal results, and our conversation was 
upon that catastrophe as we wended our perilous way along the railroad track. 
Our objective point was a jutting ledge which overlooked the falls, where we 
expected to make some shore casts for bass. The cut was narrow, the track single, 
and the curve so sharp that we could see but a few rods ahead. I was just saying 
that it might be well to get out of the cut as expeditiously as possible, when the 
premonitory rumble of the approaching train caught our ears. At first it was 
mufifled ; then rose to intenser sound. I had heard falling water do the same way, 
alternating in the cadences, and it seemed not unnatural. But I was not satisfied. 
Had we not been on the alert we would certainly have been run down. As it 
was, the shave was close. 

"Is that the roar of the falls?" I asked apprehensively, with an ear to wind- 
ward. 

■'Ye-es? No- — by heaven, no! Look!" 

The big buUseye of the locomotive shot into view like a torpedo from a 
Zalinski gun. Quick as thought, by that fortuitous prompting which enables the 
mind to formulate expedients on the jump, without forecast, I caught my loved 
wife from the track and almost flung her against the face of the side wall, where 
I pinioned her with arms extended clutching desperately to such projections as 
had been left in the blasting. I never hugged her so hard before I Fortunately 
there was a depression at that point, though it did not form a deep enough niche to 
accommodate the living statuary with comfort. The train whizzed by like a rocket 



A PERILOUS ADVENTURE AT KANAWHA FALLS. H7 

with a clatter and deafening roar such as a man hears when he is drowning. My 
face was toward its approach, and I saw the engineer looking out of the side of the 
cab, being as white as a ghost. In a twinkling he was gone, but after that instant 
the procession of coaches seemed interminable. A string of Dakota "empties" was 
never so long. Before it had half gone by I declared I could hold on to the rocks 
no longer. The draft of reflux air which the train displaced in its passage pulled 
at me like seven devils, tearing me away. If I quit my hold I would not simply 
fall; we would both be hurled like winnowed chaff under the rattling wheels. My 
fingers bled, and I felt the flesh tearing from my hands. 

At last the ordeal was over and I fell like a log. Wife bent over me an'd 
helped me rise. My palm-leaf hat made a good fan. When I had leaned a while 
and rested, we dragged ourselves out of the cut, homeward. We forebore to fish 
that day. As we neared the hotel we met a party hurrying out, and received their 
greetings. They had apprehended worse results, taking their cue from the train- 
men. 'Twas a close call. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



THE PRINCESS AND THE SALMON. 

Again the Restigouche! Egad! it is becoming a famous river! For what 
wielder of the two-handed rod, at home or abroad, has not heard its praises sung 
anon, if, indeed, he has not himself tasted its delights? What salmon fisher of 
renown has not whipped some portion of its majestic length — the largest, longest 
and noblest of all Atlantic salmon rivers on either continent? 

And why not the Restigouche? Has its too familiar name become a bore? I 
grant that there are other rivers wilder and more "wicked," some of them seldom 
visited, which might inspire a momentary interest by their vagueness or their novelty, 
but to come down to an authentic, well-tried stream, which is statedly crossed by 
angler's casts, where can there be found a more captivating stretch of water than 
the outflow of the Restigouche? Or a wilderness haunt more charming than its 
source among the alders of the "Waagan?" 

For my own part, as soon as ever the season of green peas comes round my 
thoughts revert instinctively to this New Brunswick stream, and whether I visit it 
or abstain, or whatever I do, the old familiar name with its many cherished associa- 
tions will never grow trite or tiresome. Its impetuous flow may chafe and scour 
the rounded pebbles on its bottom until the end of time, but this abrasion will only 
make their polished surfaces all the brighter, and I shall never cease to yearn for 
the music of its rapids and the crooning of its pines. 

IT has a record. 

The Restigouche has a notable record withal. Governor Boucher expatiated on 
its charms so far back as 1663, 248 years ago, in his engaging "Histoire Naturelle 
des Oiseaux et des Poissons de la Nouvelle, France." A century later, in 1761, Mr. 
Jaffray extolled its attributes as a salmon stream. He was geographer to the Prmce 
of Wales and an accepted authority, having written a large folio on Canadian birds, 
fishes, woods and rivers, which he entitled "The British Domain." In 1845, after 
another lapse of nearly one hundred years, Fred Tolfey, a British officer much 
quoted by Frank Forester, and in fact his chosen guide and mentor, published two 
illustrated volumes, which were printed in London and received with signal favor. 

More recently, in 1863, J. M. Le Moine, the historian of Canada, described the 
Restigouche in glowing terms in his "Wilderness Journeyings Through New Bruns- 
wick." Harper's Monthly took up the favorite refrain in 1868, and Hallock's "Fish- 
ing Tourist" continued it in 1873. Since which date the river has become more 
and more the Mecca of high-grade anglers, until at present all its lower reaches 
are occupied with stands and cottages, and a fishing privilege along its exclusive 
borders is valued more than a college diploma, the mere possession thereof being 
accepted as a warrant of social standing. 

RECOLLECTIONS OF A VETERAN. 

Yet, after all that has been said and printed, how much of its eventful history 
remains unwritten ! For my own part, I could fill a volume with personal reminis- 
cences of hard-fought battles, lost leaders, blank scores, and hung-up casting lines 
which appear as marginalia in the retrospect; and it is upon my pen's point, right 

(68) 



THE PRINCESS AND THE SALMON. 69 

now, to recount an incident of ambidextrous prowess wherein no less a personage 
than an estimable daughter of Queen Victoria of England took a hand, maintaining 
an obstinate contest for two mortal hours with a 28-pound salmon which had the 
temerity to enter the fists with her royal highness. This happened years 
ago, before the era of clubs and cottages, while the wilderness was still a solitude 
and few champagne bottles glistened on the margin of the stream. Only a few 
Canadian officials who had learned the superlative quality of the fishing had acquired 
some privileges on the river, and one of them, Mr. Brydges, of the Grand Trunk 
Railway, had built himself a house boat christened "Great Caesar's Ghost," which 
teams of horses were wont to haul to advantageous stands up the main river or into 
the Upsalquitch or Patapedia and even to the Quatawatatamkagearick, sixty miles 
above. On the occasion in mind this novel conveyance was appropriated by the 
Marquis of Lome, then governor general of Canada, and the vice-regal party, with 
the princess Louise pre-eminent. It was fitted up with dining-room, cabin, prome- 
nade deck, berths, kitchen, and every domestic convenience, and was regarded as 
more desirable than a short camp, because it could be shifted, and when in mid- 
stream was comparatively exempt from mosquitoes and midgets. 

Returning to her royal highness, it comes in my way to mention that I was 
stopping at that famous old hostelry of line officers and anglers at Quebec, the St. 
Louis hotel, when I received one morning the following mandatory note : 

Monday. — Mr. Hallock: The Marquis of Lome will be at my office in a few 
minutes. If you wish to see him, come down at once. 

J. U Gregory. 

Mr. Gregory was naval agent at the port. Obedient to the behest, I mounted 
a caleche at once and rattled down the hillside through the old Prescott gate to the 
lower town and along the one thoroughfare under the cliff almost tc the very base 
of Cape Diamond, where so many people were killed by a landslip not many years 
ago, though, as luck would have it, the naval office escaped. Presently I was ushered 
aboard the government steamer Druid, which lay at the admiralty wharf, and pre- 
sented without ceremony to Major De Winton, Lome's aide de camp, who has since 
received signal promotion in India, and by him to the marquis. 

HOW THE PRINCESS APPEARED. 

While we were all engaged in discussing salmon rivers and the most killing 
flies in an informal sort of way, the princess came forward to the quarter rail 
where we were standing and was gracious enough to interest herself in the con- 
versation and to inquire about the prospects of the trip to the Restigouche, whither 
we were all bound. She looked severely plain and respectable in a dusky alpaca 
dress and seaside hat. 

After an uneventful interval she mentioned incidentally that she was covering 
a lounge in the cabin, and wouldn't I step down the companionway and inspect her 
handiwork? Without claiming to be a connoisseur in such things, I put on my best 
possible face and expressed myself pleased with what I saw; and, indeed, everything 
in the apartment was very charming and domestic, with a quiet half-tone about it 
which was altogether too soothing and assuring to a republican citizen outside the 
pale of the court. I afterward begged a piece of the chintz covering as a memento 
of the interview and contributed a couple of salmon flies to the vice-regal outfit. 

Then, the interview being formally concluded, I returned to the deck and backed 
circumspectly down the gangway to the quay, with pulse in equipoise, and received 
the congratulations of my official friends. Subsequently, we all duly arrived at the 



70 ^ AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Restigouche by our several routes and conveyances. "Great Caesar's Ghost" received 
the royal guests, and being duly manned and victualed was towed up stream to the 
Indian pool with a lounge aboard. 

Ah ! what a marvelous series of pools there is from tide-water to the Kedge- 
wick, overshadowed for the most part by the high hills which flank the river on both 
sides and alternate with long stretches of white water which sparkle in the noontide 
sun. The upper river runs off the divide through sixty miles of broad, level forest, 
expressing itself in cadences which vary from a murmur to a roar, according to the 
pitch of the fall, and receiving a small brook here and- a rivulet there until it finally 
mingles with the lusty Tom Kedgewick, which is the larger of the two. 

It is an exhilirating run for a birch canoe, though somewhat gloomy and monoto- 
nous in cloudy weather. But as soon as ever the river becomes expansive with 
greater depth and volume and wider bottom the scenery changes rapidly as one 
passes along, not only from placid pool to impetuous rapid, and from impinging 
crag to sloping shore, but each rapid has its peculiar moods and features, and each 
separate landscape some striking point of view. 

It was wild enough, too, in those days, with no trace of human habitation for 
the entire distance of 120 miles, except old Chane's and Merrill's log shanties, which 
were a day's journey apart, until we came to John Mowat's, at Dee Side, now in the 
midst of a fashionable quarter. 

Once. I remember, when careering down the crests of a rattling rapid, one canoe 
came near striking a big bull moose which stood in mid channel to rid itself of flies, 
the huge animal not seeming to comprehend the situation of the approaching object 
or to have the slightest conception of the rapidly diminishing distance as the birch 
swept on. But for an opportune flip of the paddle we should have hit the brute 
full in the face ! 

PRINCESS LOUISE AND HER SALMON. 

The sun was off the river when the princess fastened to the big salmon the 
evening of her arrival, for the hills were so high as to throw their shadows over 
the surface by four o'clock of the longest day of June. The marquis was occupied 
upstream and the major below, each with his canoe and Indian guides, and her 
highness had the fun all to herself and her gaffer for a full hour before her gentle- 
men friends became aware that anything momentous was afloat. By that time the 
shadows had deepened and the anglers were prepared to reel up for the night. On 
arriving at the home pool they found the indomitable heroine standing on the bow 
of "Great Caesar's Ghost" with the stock of her salmon rod pointing skyward and 
the limber part of it bending over the dark and solemn water in a great big curve, 
from the point of which the line ran down into the depths, taut as a fiddle string. 
Her canoe was hauled alongside of the scow. 

She said the fish had been sulking for fully twenty minutes and seemed deter- 
mined to make a night of it. The water was so deep that her gillie couldn't start 
him by throwing in stones or prodding at him with the setting pole, and as for 
lifting at him with the line one might as well think of trying to raise the dead. 
Was it a very large fish? Indian Joe said, "Suppose him big as one canoe!" Had 
he showed himself at all? Oh, yes; many times. He had given her ladyship the 
liveliest sort of a turn. Was she not fatigued, and would not the marquis spell 
her for a while? 

But the plucky woman declined to share the honors with her husband and held 
on persistently to the rod. Meanwhile the attitude of the principals remained in 
status quo. 



THE PRINCESS AND THE SALMON. 71 

Now, an hour at the butt of a two-handed rod is a pretty severe test of physical 
endurance, which few considerate salmon ever impose upon the brawny sex, and 
much less upon feeble womanhood, though exceptional occurrences enable English 
ladies to "show the mettk of their breeding," and sometimes American ladies, too. 
I am proud to say. 

HOW IT WAS DONE. 

The fact is, the princess had hooked that salmon in a pool a half-mile above the 
moorage, where Joe had pointed it out to her on a sunken ledge which the canoe 
passed over. Joe was handling the canoe alone, sitting in the stern, sometimes hold- 
ing her with the paddle and anon letting her drop down with the current, checking 
her as occasion required. With another paddler in the bow the fish would have been 
observed sooner. The favoring chance for the angler was on the forward down- 
stream cast, but the instant the course overran the fish, perceiving that the oppor- 
tunity had passed she caught on to the only alternative and gave her rod a dextrous 
backward cast whereupon the fly had no sooner touched the surface of the water 
than the fish rose. He was evidently hungry for he came up with a bulge and 
threw his whole weight on the line, fastening the hook firmly in the tough gristle 
of the jaw, then settled heavily to the bottom, like a log, where he could be plainly 
seen lying motionless. Like Bad Dickey in the burlesque, it took him some minutes 
to discover that he had been stabbed, but as soon as he did wake up to a realizing 
sense of the crisis the circus began. Up and down and across the pool, in the water 
and out of the water, into the bank and under the boat, he led that indefatigable 
lady a chase and a race until he finally floundered down the main rapids through a 
quarter of a mile of rough water into the thirty-acre pool, the canoe following like 
an arrow. Here he would seem to have finally exhausted himself in a series of runs, 
whirls, gyrations and splashes, and a truce naturally followed. During the wait the 
princess was glad to accept a glass of cordial, which she needed much. 

Meanwhile the brave lady had been many times out of the canoe and on shore, 
and sometimes knee deep in the water, according as better advantage of her captive 
could be obtained, and throughout the long ordeal holding her end up heroically and 
wielding the supple wand as her august mother wields the scepter, leading her sub- 
jects or constraining them by the mild potency of deft handling and gracious finesse. 
Only when the salmon made his desperate leaps she would drop the tip deferentially, 
preferring a temporary concession to irretrievable loss. 

THE FINALE. 

And so we came eventually to the concluding act of the drama in the thick of 
the gloaming, with the shadows of eventide settling upon the pool, by which time 
the great fish was beginning to shake his head omniously and the princess could feel 
the tremor of the line. Joe noticed the vibration, too. 

"Suppose um take canoe now?" he suggested. Then without awaiting formal 
assent he brought the light craft conveniently to her feet and she slipped down 
adroitly off the scow, motioning one of the other gillies to follow. 

Every one suspected that there would be another tussle after so long a wait, 
and so the event proved, for the lady had hardly stepped aboard the canoe before 
the salmon made a big break for up stream and reeled ofif a hundred yards of line 
so swiftly that the winch fairly shrieked with the friction. But the mechanical drag 
and sag of the line soon checked the spurt, and the lost line was gradually retrieved, 
the fish coming in doggedly and disputing every inch. This brilliant run seemed to 
be a despairing effort of the captive to get away — a concentrated energy of strength 



72 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

and purpose — inasmuch as the devious tactics of the earlier struggle were not re- 
newed. Neither did he essay any new expedients. 

For the next half hour it was alternately give and take — a succession of short 
circuits, an obstinate boring against the current, with occasional spasmodic runs and 
broad display of tail, until at last it became difficult to see the shore or even the 
position of the fish. However, there was plenty of elbow room, and the canoe had 
only to follow its caprices and erratic courses, the two canoemen plying their paddles 
vigorously whenever he unexpectedly quickened his pace. Thus the struggle was 
narrowed down to a mere question of the survival of the toughest, subject all the 
time to mischances and errors of judgment. 

At length, it may be stated, the party aboard the scow became anxious as well 
as hungry, for the royal angler made no sign, and in despair of a hnish the marquis 
and his secretary took skiff for the opposite shore, where a group of dusky figures 
could be barely discerned, arriving just in time to see an uplifted rod swing heavily 
back toward the wooded bank, and to catch a glimpse of a pallid gleam beside the 
river's bank and the boil of an upward surge. Then almost instantly followed a 
sharp dip and a splash and a simultaneous sigh of relief. There was a flip-flap on 
the grass, and the noblest quarry that was ever landed by royal skill lay gasping 
and quivering in their midst. 

"Bravely done !" they murmured all, with suppressed enthusiasm. 

Then the considerate marquis attended his exhausted and supperless wife to 
her apartments on the scow, and in due time that mighty salmon was laid out in 
state, with the book and leader still hanging to its jaw, and so was sent home to 
England as a present to her majesty the queen, and an enviable trophy from her 
loving daughter and royal highness, the Princess Louise. 




FORT GEORGE ISLAND HOTEL, 

Two miles from Pilot Town, Mouth St. John's River. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



TROUTING ON LONG ISLAND — OPENING OF THE SEASON. 

On Long Island the first day of March has long been regarded by the sport- 
ing fraternity as the opening day of the trouting season. The temperature is 
warmer there than in the interior, and the snow-water runs out from the streams 
nearly a month earlier. The fish are in good condition, active, constantly on the 
lookout, and supposed to be eager to retaste the remembered pleasures of last 
year's fly-time. 

The piscatorial experts and professional fly fishers of New York seem to 
regard it as important that this season should be opened in due form as the bishop 
does that the church should be formally consecrated. They also deem it incumbent 
upon themselves to be present to wet the first line, just as fashionable young ladies 
must wear the first bonnet of the new stjde. Accordingly, on this momentous first 
of March (or rather, the day before), the afternoon train of the Long Island Rail- 
road is almost monopolized by sporting gentry in full panoply of approved jacket 
and capacious boots, and armed with rods, creels and mysterious leather cases and 
bags of divers shapes and sizes. 

A FISHING PARTY. 

They are generally men of middle age, of the rotund and jolly pattern, ventri- 
potential, who crack loud jokes and laugh from the depths of the stomach. Those 
with the ruddiest noses and smoothest faces are generally addressed familiarly as 
"judge;" others, heavily bearded, are ostensibly dubbed "generar' or "colonel" by 
the younger and less distinguished of the party, who have no titles to the universal 
admiration and nudging approval of the country people in the car. However, on 
such occasions the distinctions of caste are all obliterated by the wicked flasks that 
equalize and level. 

. This sporting party is of goodly and genteel material. It has this reputation. 
It is the aristocratic cream of the universal community of sportsmen. Many of 
them are: strangers to each other, inasrnuch as they belong to different "clubs" that 
are scattered along the whole Atlantic coast of the island. These clubs vary in 
their number of members from a half dozen to foitr-score, paying for special 
fishing privileges in private ponds and premises. There are no localities where the 
public can fish indiscriminately and without restraint, except upon the spongy 
marshes where the salt tide-water flows into the creeks ; and even here goodly fares 
of trout have been taken by inexperts. Some of the ponds are owned by wealthy 
retired merchants, and accessible only to a few particular friends. Others, not so 
well stocked, are the property of small farmers who are but too well pleased at 
the opportunity of profit from the leasing of the fishing privileges. 

These few facts being ascertained, it is easily explained why, as the railway 
train goes on its journey, parties of two and three or half a dozen get out from 
time to time at the succeeding stations. These invariably find wagons in waiting, 
and are immediately rattled off to the seaboard over four miles of barrens. 

The party in present interest consisted of four persons. Four is an agreeable 
number; it makes a table at whist, a quartet in music, and a party to a duel. The 
biggest man, corporeally, was a skillful wirepuller of wide reputation in the pisca- 

(74) 



TROUTING ON LONG ISLAND. 76 

torial circle — a man of "infinite jest" and unbounded stomach, into whose mediter- 
ranean mouth good things perpetually flowed, and out of which better came. There 
is a classical dignity, a patronizing air about his fashion of whipping in a trout that 
would make the earliest of gudgeons gracefully acknowledge the compliment of 
being caught by him. • The second in order was a thin, wiry fellow — a sort of 
piscatory assassin, a professional dealer in treasons, strategems and spoils, and a 
doctrinal believer in the efficacy of immense boots for beguiling trout. There are 
some fishermen whii would consider boots that came to their hips indispensable, 
even if they were going to fish in the dry bed of a stream. The third resembled 
a certain celebrated member of an ancient party that included several fishermen, 
inasmuch as he had an eye to the wants of others and bore the provender bag for 
them. The fourth was the subscriber, of whom the less said the better. 

GOING TO THE FISHING GROUNDS. 

You should have seen this lively quartet as it gathered at the depot on the 
afternoon preceding that Friday, 1st of March — unlucky day, but suggestive of 
fish nevertheless. There was no trace of undue excitement upon their faces. One 
would scarcely have suspected that a weight of cares rested upon their shoulders 
and that their next day's happiness depended upon the solution of muddy geomet- 
rical problems and juxtaposition of lines, angles and punts. What a convenient 
affair a railroad is ! New Yorkers would hardly think of going down Long 
Island for trout, except for the railroad. Nay, as for time and distance, it might 
be said that one can almost sit in his chamber at Brooklyn and fish in the ponds 
at Islip, sixty miles away. So we have hardly taken our seat in the cars, selected 

our flies, wet our whistles and smoked before we are set down at , where 

Brock's team is in waiting, according to program. If you ever wish to go fishing, 
arrange with this same Brock the day before, and he will hold himself in readiness 
to take you over the barrens to the fishing grounds, as he did us. Only I hope it 
won't rain as it did on that unlucky occasion, and I trust you may have a spring 
wagon, so that betwixt the agueish chills of the atmosphere and the jolting over 
the scrub oak roots in the roads, you won't rattle all the gold filling out of your 
teeth at once. The torture was brief, however, for the horses made up in speed 
what they lacked in comeliness, and away we clattered, until luggage, fishing-rods, 
horse blankets, baskets, seats and passengers were well shaken into a heap over 
the forward axle. 

In this mixed condition we were suddenly rounded to (as the sailors say) be- 
fore the door of a goodly farmhouse, with a whirl that whisked the mud over the 
outer wheels, and had the good fortune to reach its protecting porch just as the 
soggy clouds had squeezed out their last drop of rain. As we unbundled. Uncle 
Sam Ketcham waved his hand hospitably at the door, while his bashful daughter 
Susan (we learned that her name was Susan afterwards) welcomed us with her 
sunniest smile from behind the old man's shoulder, like a ray of sunrise gleaming 
over a hill. A good old matron in silver-bowed spectacles and cap asked if we 
were wet, and our fat friend answered dismally for the party that we were very 
"dry." Then we hastily shook the kinks out of our legs, and after a "hands all 
round" bestowed ourselves for the evening. 

A TROUT BRE.VKFAST. 

Early in the misty, musty morning following the war-cry was sounded, and 
the party vaulted the nearest fence for a two hours' angling before breakfast. 
Uncle Sam, with an attendant carrying oars, led the way to the pond. The signs 



76 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

did not look promising for fly-fishing. However, after persistent lashing of the 
surface, sufficient trout were taken to give a taste all around ; then we returned. 
A grateful odor soon arose from the frying-pan, and the cloth was laid. If the 
early exercise had not made us ravenous, the clean linen and the luscious comes- 
tibles that steamed upon the table, prepared by Susan's own skillful hand, would 
of themselves have provoked an appetite. Ah! Messrs. Editors, if you would have 
trout cooked as trout should be; if you would have them done to a turn; if you 
would have them broiled, baked, fried crisp and brown, done in bread crumbs, or 
served in any other style that tickles the palate or provokes the appetite; if you 
would have the delicious fish unfolded in rich pink flakes like the petals of a blush 
rose, which, dexterously lifted with your knife-point, reveals the trout's backbone 
as white and shining as the pearly teeth of an Indian princess; then, oh then, go 
to Susan ! I know not what her other qualifications may be. She is good looking 
certainly. She is attentive to your wants, and obliging. She may make a capital 
wife for some wayfaring sportsman. But if she have none of the attributes which 
go to make man blessed, she can at least cook trout. If you wish just such a fine 
mess of trout, Mr. Editor, just drop them (the trout) a line, as I have done, and 
if you don't receive an answer, prompt and decisive, you deserve to be beaten with 
your own rod. 

TROUT FISHING. 

After breakfast the piscatorial assassin in big boots wished to try his luck in 
the stream that formed the outlet of the pond; so the party was divided, we two 
choosing the stream and the others the boats. It was not one of those streams 
that go laughing and rippling under branches of trees, gurgling through grassy 
meadows, eddying around huge prone logs, and murmuring under the alders; but 
it would a somewhat sluggish and tortuous coarse through the brown and sloppy 
mud flats to the ocean. There is a great deal in the surroundings and associations 
that make trout fishing exciting and fascinating. To cast your eye ovtr the brink 
and watch your fly as it dances on the edge of a silvery ripple; to catch the sharp 
gleam of light just beneath, and feel a sharp tug on the instant thrill through 
the veins like the spark from a galvanic battery; to experience the peculiar sensa- 
tion of that electric current as it flashes along your spine to the toes ; this is the 
ecstacy — the primary delight of trout fishing. 

Next comes the sport (if the fish be a large one) of leading him tenderly 
through all the intricate windings and avenues of his expiring agony, until you 
have landed him drowned safely in your creel. I cannot swear, Mr. Editor, that 
the trout feels precisely the same delights in the same degree that you — I mean that 
anglers — do, but he has doubtless some feeling in the matter. If it is not pain he 
feels he certainly shows every symptom of astonishment, to say the least. Then 
he invariably gives a dying struggle or two in the 'basket at your side by way of 
admonition — ^you can hardly determine whether it be a twinge of conscience or an- 
other bite at the end of your line. If undubitably the latter, conscience is instantly 
unheeded, and you address all your faculties to the task of filling your creel and 
killing the biggest fish. 

Whatever my friend of the capacious boots may think, I do not call it sport 
to stand in ice water up to one's hips and grow blue and numb with cold, while 
we beat the surface with the regular swing of a pendulum, scarcely tempting a 
single rise. Once I struck a fine large fish, and for a few moments enjoyed him 
well. He was an active fellow, and for a while it seemed a draw game between 
us. At last I had him alongside and passive, as I believed. The bank was steep, 



TROUTING ON LONG ISLAND. 77 

and, as I had no landing net, I brought him to the edge and carefully passed my 
thumb and finger down the gut to seize his gill. The chances were even then. 
It was a mere flip of a copper between us; but just as I thought I had him he 
"turned tail," and I lost. Disgusted, I drew my chilled limbs up the bank and 
returned to warm fire and hot toddy at the house. After a while I returned to the 
scene of action again. The others had come down from the pond to ascertain 
Boots' luck. Boots was still intent on piscatory pursuits, standing deep in the ice- 
water. No wonder he went home with a cold ! He had taken a half dozen. The 
fat member I found snugly ensconced in an adjacent cock of salt hay, philo- 
sophically smoking. The other I could not see, but I heard him hooting forth 
some doleful salutations as a signal of recall to a late dinner. 

Limited space forbids any further details of personal adventure. Those who 
kept sacred the opening day of the season in different localities met varying success, 
but poor at the best. There was a general jollification all around within doors. 
This was pleasant. But if I wished for fullness of enjoyment in trout fishing, I 
should hereafter select some other day than the first of March. 

XoTE. — The foregoing chapter was written by ^Ir. Hallock in 1S67, and gives a fine pen 
picture of trouting on old Long Island nearly fifty years ago. — Editor. 



CHAPTER XV. 



AMERICAN ANGLING LITERATURE. 



The history of angling literature in America is not difficult to trace for one 
who has clasped hands with those who were sponsers at its christening, and has 
had the good fortune to know personally almost every author of note since the 
era of angling books began; but to do full justice to each one, and to apportion 
to each the part he has borne, and the good he has done, is a difficult task, likely 
to become invidious. There are many exceedingly valuable contributors to the 
general fund of information in the several departments of ichthyology, who do 
not appear as authors, and there are comparatively few authors who write on 
the basis of their own personal observations and experience, trusting rather to 
the statements of accepted authorities to insure accuracy for their publications, 
and give them the requisite backbone. My preference would be not to laud the 
popular author so much as to designate such as have been able to contribute any- 
thing at all to the sum total of knowledge, and to an intelligent comprehension of 
the fishes of the country. There was a time when a printed volume was the 
emanation or expression of a mind which was master of its subject, and its 
opinions were entitled to respect as those of one speaking by authority, and not 
as the scribes; but, nowadays, well — as Joel Penman pertinently remarks, "Any 
fule kin rite a buke !" 

There is no end to the literature of angling. One is amazed at its redund- 
ancy. Everyone who goes a-fishing must needs tell of it in the sporting papers, 
if not in more pretentious publications. Their manifold collective utterances are 
like the chattering of blackbirds in spring, joyful but vapid'; yet they include a 
fair proportion of monographs and random field notes, which, in the aggregate, 
form an exceedingly valuable compendium of ichthyological research. Much of 
this class of materials has been already collated and compiled by the collaboraters 
of the Smithsonian Institution into several illustrated quarto volumes, entitled 
"Fisheries Industries of the United States." The full statistics of the past having 
been brought down to date, and the work thoroughly systematized, it will be 
prosecuted to the end of time, as long as fish swim and Congressional appropria- 
tions can be voted for collection and printing. The steps progressive toward the 
ultimate accomplishment may be partially outlined in the brief synopsis which 
follows. 

In earliest Colonial times, the reports sent to the Home Governments from 
New England, Virginia, and Florida included a fair description or enumeration 
of the ichthyofauna of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts ; and, as the population grad- 
ually spread towards the Ohio river and the Great Lakes, interest was continually 
kept alive by the multiplying forms which were discovered. Angling was some- 
times practised by gentlemen of leisure, as we discover from a musty little volume 
printed in Philadelphia in 1830, and most interesting it is, too — which gives the 
"Memoirs of the Schuylkill Fishing Club" from 1732 to 1830. Such a diary, 
extending over a period of nearly one hundred years, must be without a parallel 
in any land. The subsequent occupation and development of the country opened 
out an immense and abounding field for the angler and his inseparable associates, 

(78) 



amj-:r[Can angling literatl^re. 79 

the commercial fishermen and the naturahst — a fact which Englishmen, who are 
always loremost in such matters, were not slow to discover and avail themselves 
of. British officers stationed in the provinces were able to enjoy exclusively the 
delights of the Canadian salmon streams for half a century at least before the 
unsophisticated settlers or their neighbors in the States were even aware of their 
existence. Quietly they tossed the "Kippurns," or what-not. into the sequestered 
pools of a primitive wilderness, and were not envied or disturbed, because, for- 
sooth, their sports were not appreciated or understood. This anomaly of tastes 
and pastimes can be explained. Up to forty years ago Americans were too busy 
to wile away time in fishing. They had not accumulated the "piles" which now 
make millionaires as plenty as blackberries ; indeed, they hardly knew a salmon or 
trout by sight. If they wanted sport, they naturally turned to hunting. The 
gun and the chase were incidental to their everyday associations and employ- 
ment of subduing the forest and driving pioneer stakes. And so it happened in 
respect to the primitive literature of this new country, that many topical books 
appeared on the dog, gun, and saddle, bear hunting, trapping, buffalo running, 
Indian fighting, and the like, but none at all on angling. 

Once in a while a contemplative author like Thoreau. sauntering by the river 
side, or Willis, from "Under a Bridge," or Prime in "Owl Creek Cabin Letters," 
or Ik Marvel, wrapt in "Reveries," would lead us unsuspectingly into secluded 
by-paths of the forest, discanting piously upon the silvery denizens of the brooks 
in a fashion to prompt an occasional vacation rambler to go a-fishing. But these 
new men (novi homines) in the days of their novitiate, never aspired to higher 
game than the "trout in speckled pride." The way in which they held him up 
to tender recognition might make a sentimental person wish to fondle, but never 
to skin and eat him. Prime, good master, was adolescent then and callow, but 
he was a born angler, well versed in the mysteries of the brooks ; and, as soon as 
ever his heart was hardened and he ceased to regard the beautiful things as pets, 
he began to write bravely of kidnapping them from their fluvial home and "play- 
ing them scientifically." and so has continued to write for forty years, though he 
has never risen to the higher plane of the salmon. I suppose that the undisputed 
pioneer of American Anglishing Literature, pure and undefiled, is Charles Lanman, 
who came as one crying in the wilderness, as early as 1848, when he printed (in 
London) his "Adventures of a Salmon Angler in Canada." The same book was 
issued contemporaneously in America as a "Tour of the Saguenay." His sub- 
sequent wanderings by lake and river were woven into a double octavo volume 
of most entertaining sketches, under the title of "Adventures in the Wilds of 
America," printed in 1856. He has no peer among his countrymen. Surely it 
was no kid-glove excursion to go salmon fishing here before the era of railroads, 
clubs, culexifuge, and all that, though the chap who daintily airs his latter day 
experience seems as much of a "feller" as the man who took it in the rough before 
the lad was born. No doubt the memory of the Rev. John Todd has passed away 
with his corporeal taking-off, yet he was a companion of Audubon, and wrote 
"Long Lake" in 1850, a volume which embodied the first oracular utterances 
from the Adirondack Woods. And there was the Rev. Dr. Bethune, who edited 
a volume of Walton in 1848, or thereabouts ; he knew the intricacies of the Maine 
forests and the haunts of the mysterious land-locked salmon for forty years before 
the scientists determined what it was. It seems but yesterday since I knew them 
all — indeed, Lanman and Prime are still living and hearty. 

Although I write of pastime, I would not detract one iota from the meed of 



80 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

praise which belongs to those progressive men in the early decades of the present 
century, who blazed a warpath into the fallow field of New World ichthyic science. 
There were Lewis and Clark, partners in exploration beyond the Rockies, who 
discovered the mountain trout and whitefish in 1809; Rafinesque, whose synoptical 
report of the "Fishes of the Ohio River and Its Tributaries," printed in 1820, was 
the first American publication in the interest of ichthyology; Dr. Kirtland, who 
followed with his "Fishes of the Ohio," in 1828 ; Professor Edward Hitchcock, 
on "Massachusetts Fishes," in 1835 ; Storer, on the "Ichthyology of Massachusetts," 
in 1839; Agassiz, on the "Embryology of the Salmon," in 1842; De Kay, on 
"Fishes of New York," admirably illustrated with plates, in 1842 ; Storer, on 
"Fishes of North America," in 1846, an ambitious, but really comprehensive, 
work; and, finally, a general treatise on "Fish Culture," by Theodatus Garlick, 
in 1848. These admirable text-books furnished a sufficient groundwork for 
intelligent prosecution of the study, and no doubt stimulated the pursuit of 
angling, for thenceforward angling books appeared in gradually increasing num- 
bers, the field broadening as the area of the country extended. English publica- 
tions, which had hitherto served as the angler's vade mecum, began to be dis- 
carded, or they were revamped and adapted to what gradually came to be dis- 
covered as American wants and American ideas. Such were Smith's "Observa- 
tions on Angling," printed in 1833; the "American Angler's Guide," printed in 
1846; Bethune's "Walton," in 1848; and Frank Forester's "Fish and Fishing," 
in 1849. The first strictly indigenous native American book was John G. Brown's 
"Angler's Guide," which appeared in 1849. It marked a new era. But Brown 
was only a poor tackle maker, without classical education or social position, and 
how should he be expected to know anything? The critics rated him unmerci- 
fully. Nevertheless, his was a very complete and trustworthy guide to salt and 
fresh water fishing for the time, and well illustrated. Yet we are surprised to 
note its deficiencies. There is not a word about Canadian salmon, or grayling, 
or striped bass, or the fifty other principal kinds of fish which afford sport now. 
Fly fishing itself was then a new art. Up to 1845 it was scarcely known, and 
little practiced. Americans never knew how to fish for salmon until 1860. 
Lanman was the only angler among them who had been initiated, and he was 
not proficient. A meagre twelve lines on page eighty is all that Frank Forester 
devotes to salmon in America, and Forester was thought to be an advanced writer. 

I have said that Englishmen were foremost to discover the unusual attrac- 
tions of our virgin salmon streams. So also they were the first to divulge them 
to the world in books. One by one those who had fished began to reveal the 
secrets of the primeval penetralia into which they had ventured years before. 
"Chiploquorgan," by Capt. Dashwood, and "Forest Life in Acadia," by Capt. 
Hardy, both British officers, printed in 1858, are incomparable sketches of scenes 
which no hearth rug knight of the quill would dare attempt to portray. "L'Acadie," 
a London book printed in 1849, is a delightful idyl of the Canadian woods. 
Latrobe's "Rambles in North America" (1835) contains something about fishing. 
Though of materials essentially American, these books were English in sentiment 
and emotion. They lack the amour propre of one who "treads his native heath." 
Long we have waited for such a book, but I doubt if it has ever yet been written. 

In 1850 the indefatigable Storer, of Massachusetts, wrote up the "Fishes of 
Nova Scotia and Labrador." Dr. Gilpin, Matthew Jones, of Halifax, U. S., and 
Rev. M. Harvey, of Newfoundland, were also industrious pamphleteers. In 
1852 Girard published his "Fresh Water Fishes of North America." In 1855 the 



AMERICAN ANGL1N(J LITERATURE. 81 

ichthyology of the northwest was fairly covered by Dr. Suckley, U. S. A., in th^ 
"Pacific Railroad Reports." Moses Parley printed his "Fisheries of New Bruns- 
wick" in 1862. In the same year Holbrook's ambitious work on the "Fishes of 
South Carolina" appeared — a large quarto, with colored portraits of the fishes 
described. The civil war broke out before the work was finshed, and the sub- 
sequent death of the author precluded its continuance. In 1866 Lord's "Naturalist 
in British Columbia" was published. Other books, of more or less interest to the 
angler, appeared from time to time, but none of special value. Nothing like a 
comprehensive manual was published until 1864, when Roosevelt's "Game Fish 
of the North" came out. That was during the year of the first lease of a 
Canadian salmon river, the Nepissiguit, and the book made special reference to 
that famous stream in its chapter on salmon fishing, itself a new revelation to 
the fraternity of fishermen. How to fish for salmon, and the implements to be 
used, and a description of the sport, had never been presented before. The 
volume was a godsend to anglers, for it included the technology of angling, fly- 
fishing, tackle-making, entomology, fish culture, camping out, etc. It described 
new devices, new methods, and new fields of sp»ort, which had come into use 
during the sixteen years that had intervened since the enterprising Browne had 
prepared his "Angler's Guide." Moreover, it introduced new species of fishes, 
not previously regarded for sport, and identified others which had been in doubt. 
The whole subject was in chaos at that time, scientifically consideired. Experts 
had not even quite determined whether a brook trout and a samlet (parr) were 
the same, or that brook trout were not, in fact, immature salmon. The world 
has moved since then. 

In 1865, the year following, Roosevelt put out a supplementary book, entitled 
"Superior Fishing," relating chiefly to the fishes of the Great Lakes, and touching 
the lately mooted subject of fish protection. The two books together covered 
the common brook trout, the sea trout, the salmon, landlocked salmon, the 
coregoni group, the common carp, the mascalonge, pickerel, and great northern 
pike (now known as the Mississippi mascalonge, in distinction from the masca- 
longe of the St. Lawrence system), the two then scarcely recognized varieties of 
black bass, the rock bass, yellow perch, pike perch or wall-eye, the great lake trout 
(namaycush), lake trout, and siscowet, all of them fresh-water fish; and the blue 
fish, striped bass, Spanish mackerel, and snapping mackerel (which has since been 
identified as a young bluefish), all salt-water fish — twenty-one varieties all told. 
The same year "Uncle" Thad Norris produced his "American Angler's Book," a 
magnificent illustrated octavo of 700 pages (distinctively American, and no 
mistaking its type), of the same general character and scope as Mr. Roosevelt's 
dual publication, and including descriptions of some fifty varieties of fishes, of 
which sixteen were salt-water forms ; but with the disadvantage of being not 
always accurate. The author was somewhat "mixed" in his ichthyology, and 
liable to describe without having seen. His carelessness in these respects drew 
upon himself the gentle reprehension of certain professional Canadians, which 
he had the good sense to receive graciously, and print in an appendix to later 
editions. For the most part, however, the book can be relied on, and is service- 
able. In 1869, Genio C. Scott, an expert in trout and striped bass fishing, printed 
a copiously illustrated octavo volume, entitled "Fishing in American Waters," 
which is open to the same objections as Norris's Book, only more so. He 
devoted large space to salt-water fish, with many of which he was well ac- 
quainted, and would have made a first-class book had he not prospected beyond 



82 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

his depth. By this time, too, science had made considerable progress, so that 
his errors became the more glaring. The praiseworthy quality about Roosevelt 
is that he seldom maikes mistakes. 

The same year Mr. Allerton described the monster trout of Maine, which 
have been caught of 18-pound weight, in a very creditable book with the rather 
general title of "Brook Trout Fishing." There were other readable books of 
the generic type, some of them having high literary merit (Dawson's "Pleasures 
of Angling" being one of them, and Dr. Updegraff's "Bodines" another), but 
whose specific value consisted in the acquaintance they made with new resorts, 
such as the Adirondacks (Headley, 1856), the White Mountains (Prime, 1867), 
the Delaware Waters (Krider, 1853), the Blue Ridge of Virginia (Strother, 
1856), the Magog District of Canada (1867), the Upper Mississippi (Oliver 
Gibbs, 1869), and Carolina Sports (Elliott). Bertram's "Harvest of the Sea" 
(1866) was valuable to naturalists, containing much new information about 
Florida fishes. By the close of the decade fish culture attracted increased atten- 
tion, and we therefore note sundry books on that subject, to wit: "Artificial Fish 
Breeding," by Fry (1866) ; "Fish Culture for Shad, Salmon, etc." (1868) ; "Direc- 
tions for Raising Trout" (Stone, 1868), "Domesticated Trout' (1872), by the 
same author; and "Trout Culture," by Slack (1873). Perhaps a full bibliography 
of American books to the date last named will assist the collector and interest 
the reader, in spite of the partial recapitulation, and I therefore venture to 
interpolate it here as a sort of relay house on our historical tour. I claim it as 
the most perfect list yet printed : 

Rafinesque — Ohio River and Tributaries. . . 1820 Wet Days at Edgewood, G. K. Marvel 1855 

Fishes of Ohio, Kirtland 1828 Virginia Illustrated, Strother 1856 

Memoirs of Schuylkill Fishing Club from Adirondacks. Headley 1856- 

1732 to 1830 1830 Frank Forester's Manual 1857 

Observations on Angling, Smith 1833 Hudson Bay, or Every-day Life in the 

Massachusetts Fishes. Hitchcock 1885 Wilds of North America. 1858 

Rambles in North America, Latrobe 1S35 St. Lawrence and Its Tributaries, Hattle. . 1859 

Ichthyology of Massachusetts, Storer 1839 Carolina Sports, Elliott 1859 

Embroyology of the Salmon, Agassiz 1842 Salmon Fishing in Canada, Hamilton 1860 

Fishes of New York, De Kay 1842 Fisheries of New Brunswick, Perley 1862 

.American Angler's Guide, Brown 1846 Fishes of South Carolina, Holbrook 1862 

Fishes of North America, Storer 1846 Game Fish of the North, Roosevelt 1864 

Walton — Bethune 1848 Arcadia (Northern New York) 1864 

Fish Culture, Garlick 1848 American Angler's Book, Norris 1865 

Adventures of an Angler in Canada; Tour Shooting and Fishing, Re\"oiI 1865 

of the Saguenay, Lanman 1848 Superior Fishing, Roosevelt 1865 

Owl Creek Cabin Letters, Prime ' 1848 Naturalist in British Columbia, Lord 1866 

L'Acadie (London) 1849 Artificial Fish Breeding, Fry 1866 

Fish and Fishing, Forester 1849 Later Years' Fishing, Prime 1867 

American Angler's Guide, J. J. Brown.. . . 1849 Magog District 1867 

American Sportsman, Lewis 1850 Hints to Anglers, Bell 1868 

Fisher's Manual for the United States 1850 Random Casts 1868 

Long Lake. Todd 1850 Adirondacks, Murray 1S6S 

With Hook and Line, Forester 1851 Directions for Raising Trout, Stone 1868 

Fresh-Water Fishes of North America, Lake Pepin Fish Chowder, Gibbs 1869 

Girard 1852 Brook Trout Fishing, Allerton 1869 

Old House by the River, Prime 1853 Fishing in American Waters, Scott 1869 

Sporting Anecdotes, Klapp-Krider 1853 Forest Life in Acadie, Hardy 1869 

Blackwater Chronicle, Strother 1853 Chiploquorgan, Dashwood 1871 

Hills, Lakes and Streams, Hammond 1854 Trout Culture, Slack 1872 

Pacific R. R. Reports, Suckley 1855 Domesticated Trout. Stone 187.3 

Hallock's "Fishing Tourist" appeared in 1873. It was chiefly a record of 
personal observation and travel, which covered all the trout and salmon waters 
of the Continent, including the Pacific Coast. It introduced the Michigan gray- 
ling, which thenceforward became such a popular game fish that it was well 



AxMERICAN ANGLING LITERATURE. 83 

nigh exterminated in the course of the succeeding ten years. In 1877 the same 
author, being editor of Forest and Stream at the time, printed the "Sportsman's 
Gazetteer," a volume of 900 pages, which became at once the standard reference 
book of American sportsmen. It was strictly an encyclopedia. It described and 
classified some three hundred varieties of salt and fresh-water fishes, giving their 
local names and synonyms, the first attempt ever made in a popular work. It 
included also a copious glossary of sporting terras, and a complete directory to 
all the sporting localities in each state, territory, and Canadian Province, by 
townships and counties, even to far off Alaska — a region whose ichthyology has 
since been treated at length by the same author in "Our New Alaska." The 
"Sportsman's Gazetteer" made the first classification of Pacific coast fishes, the 
same having been revised and verified by Professor Gill, whose scientific work 
plays such important part in advanced ichthyology. In 1878 Professor Gordan 
issued his "Manual of Vertebrates," a comprehensive and much needed work, 
fully up to the times. Ferguson's "Fishes of Maryland," and the annual reports 
of the thirty or more state fish commissioners, formed important accessions to 
the rapidly accumulating knowledge on fish subjects. Henshall's "Book of the 
Black Bass" (1881) was a special monography of great value. "Sport with the 
Rod and Gun" (1883) is deserving of mention as an elegant collocation of 
sketches, which combine vivid style with practical information. In the technology 
of angling four books have appeared during the past three years, which are quite 
thorough and comprehensive, and altogether indispensable to the practical 
angler. "Fishing with the Fly" (Orvis-Cheney, 1886) is illustrated with colored 
lithographs of salmon, bass, and trout flies, in no less than 143 popular and 
approved patterns. "Fly Rods and Tackle" (Wells, 1885) is a thoroughly 
American book of instruction, covering the entire field of angling mechanics in a 
masterful way, with drawings, diagrams, and demonstrations of perfunctory 
problems. The author is somewhat theoretical, and consequently dogmatic and 
arbitrary, a disposition which is made especially manifest in his more pretentious 
but less reliable book, "The American Salmon Angler." Old anglers accept as 
much of it as they can approve, and quietly reject the balance. A more 
thorough paced book, as a horseman might term it, is Keene's "Fishing Tackle" 
(1886). The author is an Englishman, resident in the United States, but equally 
at home in both countries, and altogether dispassionate and unprejudiced. He 
seems to have the happy faculty of a wise discrimination and judicious selection, 
rejecting whatever is bad in this or the other, and striving to combine hold fast, 
and recommend that which is good. "Fly-fishing and Fly-making" (1887), by 
the same author, is a sensible bok, which will suit the anglers of the old school. 
It endorses tried and approved methods, and is cautious of innovations. One 
very remarkable production, most creditable to its compiler, and certainly falling 
within the scope of legitimate angling literature, is the latest catalogue issued 
by Messrs. Abbey and Imrie, of New York, which contains some 1,500 illustra- 
tions, covering the entire range of angling outfits. Such an inimitable pictorial 
exposition is most useful in objective instruction, and ought to be catalogued 
in every angling library. 

Included in miscellaneous angling literature are the copious and unremitting 
contributions to the weekly sporting papers, of which a single one, the American 
Angler, is devoted exclusively to fish and fishing. The redundancy of such 
material is amazing. It constitutes a sort of indispensable remplissage for om- 



84 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

nivorous demand, but its value is uncertain. "X" represents both its quantity 
and quality. An attempt to mention every writer of merit who has scratched 
his name with a fishbone on the illusive sand would make one tired; yet there is 
an indefatigable collector, Professor G. Brown Goode, the well-known chief of 
the U. S. National Museum, who has been compiling a bibliography of American 
ichthyology for the past ten years (!) and, although the product increases faster 
than he can garner, he hopes some day to corral the entire lot. His collocation 
will bring out prominently the names of noteworthy pioneers who are inseparable 
from early efforts, like Seth Green, Mather, Milner, Ainsworth, Hessel, Barnet 
Phillips, S. C. Clarke, Redding, Atkins, Brackett, Hudson, and a host of others, 
as well as the busy and more enlightened systematic workers of the present day 
like Bean, McDonald, Bendire, Earll, IngersoU, Allen, True, et al. to the end of 
the long and distinguished list. 

"Zoology of the Northwest" (1878), prepared by Lieut. Wheeler, is the title 
of the first of those ponderous volumes prepared under the auspices of the gov- 
ernment, and now being issued from year to year, which are to render the labor 
of the future reviewer a pleasing task. It is an illustrated quarto, covering 
ground in part which had been imperfectly investigated by Dr. Suckley in 1855. 
Gill's "Bibliography of Fishes" (1882), and his "Arrangement of Fishes" (1883) 
are scientifically important, and so is Jordan and Gilbert's "Synopsis of the 
Fishes of North America," which gives the nomenclature and descriptions of all 
known species of fishes north of the boundary between the United States and 
Mexico. It has a compass of 1,018 pages, and describes 23 orders, 173 families, 
487 genera, 1,840 species, and over two thousand varieties of American fishes. 
Justly collossal, it stands like a mighty monolith at the very vestibule of the 
majestic Temple of Ichthus which is gradually taking form and dimension 
through the combined efforts of trained artificers and master workmen operating 
under the skillful direction of U. S. Fish Commissioner Baird. 

This book of Jordan's is illustrative of a new era. It forms a preliminary 
part of the great cumulative work which it foreshadows and may perpetuate, 
and of which such elaborations as Goode's "Fishing Industries of the United 
States," illustrated with hundreds of plates, and the pioneer merely of a forth- 
coming series, and the annual "Bulletins of the U. S. Fishery Commission," and 
Baird's "Pacific Railroad Reports" and the "Fishes of the Eastern Coast of the 
United States from Greenland to Georgia," already stand out in conspicious pro- 
portions. Henceforth, the philology of angling is relegated to the poets, of whom 
the venerable Isaac McLellan, now living, and still singing at the age of eighty- 
three, is almost the sole American representative. He and "Nessmuk" may 
chant their "Forest Runes" together in the porch of the Temple, and dillettante 
authors hang their garlands on the horns of its high altar, but science will 
henceforth be the reigning god and all the ichthic offerings be made to him 
alone. Knowledge is everything. No angler may catch a fish without a Latin 
name, and all the arts, appliances, and methods of fishing will be contrived to 
that end. Nature and science will plod perpetually hand in hand over the classic 
boulevard, pari passu, trained to equal steps, while high upon the architrave, 
over the porch, appears in bold relief the cabalistic legend, alike suggestive of 
the impulse and incentive. Pisces in hoc signo vinces. 

A continuation of the angling bibliography may here appropriately follow, 
concluding what has been begun. 



AMERICAN ANGLING LITERATURE. 



85 



Fishing Tourist, Hallock 1873 

I Go a Fishing. Prime 1874 

Camp Life in Florida, Hallock 1876 

Fishes of Maryland, Ferguson 1876 

Fish Hatching and Fish Catching, by Roose- 
velt and Seth Green 1876 

Adirondacks, Wallace 1876 

Richardson and Rangeley Lakes, Farrar... 1876 

Pleasures of Angling, Dawson 1876 

Fur, Fin and Feather 1872-6 

Sportsman's Gazetteer, Hallock 1877 

Vacation Rambles in Michigan, Hallock.. . . 1877 

Whitney's Pathfinder (Florida) 1877 

Adirondack Tales. Murray 1877 

Northern Michigan, Leet 1878 

On the Ebb. Hotchkiss 1878 

Adirondack Wilderness, Warner 1878 

How to Camp Out, Gould 1878 

Moosehead Lake, Farrar 1878 

Shooting, Boating and Fishing, Warren... 1878 

Canoe and Camera, Steele 1878 

Canoeing in Kanuckia, Habberton 1878 

Manual of Vertebrates. Jordan 1878 

Trout Culture, Seth Green 1878 

Zoology of the Northwest. Wheeler 1878 

Voyage of the Paper Canoe, Bishop 1878 

Four Months in a Sneak Box, Bishop 1879 

Flirtation Camp, Van Dyke (California) . . . 1881 

Book of the Black Bass. Henshall 1881 



Bibliography of Fishes, Gill 1882 

Arrangement of Fishes, Gill 1883 

Sport with Rod and Gun 1883 

Fish, Prouty 1883 

Foster's Scientific Angler, Harris 1883 

Pacific R. R. Reports, Baird 1883 

Fishes of the Eastern Coast, from Green- 
land to Georgia 1883 

Synopsis of Fishes, Jordan 1883 

Bodines. Dr. Updegraff 1883 

Fishery Industries of the United States, 

Goode 1884 

Camping and Cruising in Florida, Henshall. . 1884 

Woods and Lakes of Maine, Hubbard 1884 

Fly Fishing in Maine, Stevens 1884 

Rod and Line in Colorado, France 1884 

Menhaden, Goode 1885 

Flv Rods and Fly Tackle, Wells 1885 

Angler's Guide, Harris 1885 

Bulletin of United States Fish Commission 1871-87 

American Salmon Fisher. Wells 1886 

Our New Alaska, Hallock - 1886 

Fishing with the Fly, Orvis-Cheney 1886 

Fishing on the Brule, King (Wisconsin) . . . 1886 

Fishing Tackle, Keene 1886 

Fly Fishing and Fly Making, Keene 1887 

Forest Runes^ Nessmuk 1887 

Fishes of Georgia, etc., Jordan 1887 



In contemplating the varied brilliancy of the stars, I sometimes see a luminary 
cross the field of vision which is nearer and brighter than all the rest. It leaves 
a train of glory in its transit, which seems for the moment to eclipse all bright- 
ness, and while it blazes it excites the admiration of stolid gazers who are wont 
to regard the steadfast planets without emotion. Occasionally these asteriods 
occur in bewildering showers, so that all the firmament seems filled with scintilla- 
tions of unwonted genius, and modest mortals hide their diminished heads. Then 
their light abruptly goes out, and the fixed white orbs gleam steadily as before. 
And so it is with books. The moral applies : Fame is a headstrong jade, and fickle. 
—London Field, July 11, 1887. 



CHAPTER XVI. ' 

A JUNE RISE ON THE GODBOUT. 

Hon. Allan Gilmour, Scotchman, the hospitable laird of the Godbout river 
in lower Canada, who for thirty years has almost annually whipped its creamy 
waters for salmon, is dead. Let every mourner drop a stone. He fell asleep by the 
Lethe side at Ottawa last February, in the ripeness of years and full of honors, and 
now the pools will rest. His age was 79. 

Many were the honored guests among clergy, nobility and laymen who partook 
of his sumptuous bounty in the midsummer outings at the camp. He was super- 
lative as a host, and as an angler peerless. No such doughty wielder of the two 
handed rod as he. His river record was never beaten. Bereavement falls upon the 
craftsmen heavily, like the penumbra of an eclipse. Life long friends lament him 
as a good man gone, jovial and companionable. The civic record says: "His 
name was associated with every good work in Ottawa, and his purse was always open 
to every benevolent and deserving cause." 

Mr. Gilmour was a bachelor millionaire, domiciled with his nephew, John 
Manuel, who now inherits his possessions, and to a degree his proclivities and his 
worth. Of the many elegant private residences of the Dominion capital his was the 
most pretentious. It is located on the verge of the limestone cliff whose base is 
washed by the swirl of the Ridean Falls, and under the very aegis of the Parliament 
buildings whose clustering towers and aspiring dome overlook a great natural basin 
enclosed by circumvallant hills clothed with forest. This mansion has an aristo- 
cratic bearing of the Old World order. Lofty walls of stone and gates of iron 
enclose its servants' quarters. Palms, magnolias bananas, orchids, oleanders and 
other tropical plants flourish under glass. Heads of buffalo, moose, deer and caribou, 
and various trophies of the chase adorn the halls ; and in the picture gallery is the 
finest collection of paintings in Canada, many of them purchased by the proprietor 
at great expense during extended travels in Europe and Africa, and fully one-third 
illustrating wild life on the remote frontiers of the Dominion. (One of these 
subject was reproduced recently as a reminiscence of the "Glassy Pool" on the 
Godbout). 

From a terrace on the crest of a cliff a flight of 115 steps descends to a rustic 
boat-landing by the river margin beneath, where the famous steam yacht, "Cruiser," 
the hero of many adventurous voyages, sometimes lies ; more luxurious in her ap- 
pointments than Cleopatra's barge, more sumptuous than a Pullman palace car. She 
is eighty-five feet long, as staunch and steady in a sea-way as the great mail steamers ; 
and I can fairly see her now, as I recall a former voyage, taking the combers of the 
St. Lawrence rapids in flying leaps as she speeds her way down river from Ottawa 
to Quebec, the starting point for the lower river, Morituri salutaris. 

The events of fifteen years ago come back, dear reader, as vividly as if no 
interval lay between ; as if the grand old sportsman were not already dead and buried 
and wrapped in his winding sheet, stark and stiff. In my mind's eye I see him 
standing on the quarter deck, six feet four inches high in bodily presence, sniffing 
the first whiff of the salt sea air from the Gulf, as the bow of the sturdy craft 
dips into the whitening foam, buffeting the surges and throwing them aside as she 

(86) 



A JUNK RISE ON THE GODROUT. Hl 

bowls along. Such voyaging is the very ecstacy of exhillaration. And then the 
anticipation of the sport that is to come when we *get below and the salmon strike in. 

As the late lamented Francis Francis of London Field writes in his rapturous 
"Sporting Sketches," all alive to the spirit of the occasion : "It is a strange thing 
how the very mention of salmon-fishing makes one prick up one's ears, and how the 
thought of it sends a sort of thrill through pulses grown old and torpid, and how, 
€ven when one is declining into the vale of years, the prospect of a week's good 
flailing in a well stocked, kindly dispositioned river sets one's spirit bounding and 
sparkling with delight. We chirrup and we sing. Very little makes us laugh, and 
jokes which would have been regarded at any other time as very small beer are 
now most excellent fooling. Ha, ha ! ho, ho ! Cackle, cackle ! Dash it all ! I feel 
twenty years younger. By Jingo ! I feel thirty years younger. I feel — I feel — jolly 
thirsty, old fellow — don't you? Pass the lotion. Here's health to man and death 
to fish!" 

Gilmour's bon hommie was just the same. His Scotch humor was always at the 
fore, like the burgee of his yacht. 

Very few yachtsmen make the tour of the lower St. Lawrence, though its 
salmon rivers are numerous. The distance is great ; the channel intricate and beset 
with shoals, the scenery monotonous and depressing, and the expense heavy. Only 
at a few eligible locations along shore are signs of human life — here a fisherman's 
cabin and there a solitary post of the Hudson Bay Company. The north coast 
especially is for the most part bleak and forbidding desolation for hundreds of miles, 
and the only creatures that exist there are the weird birds which love the crags 
and the storm, the tumbling porpoises and the mysterious seals. From the abutting 
promontory which forms Cape Diamond at Quebec to the castellated rocks at Henley 
Harbor, near the eastern entrance of Belle Isle Strait, 800 miles away, there is an 
almost unbroken wall of granite, except where it is slashed by the impetuous streams 
which have cut their passage through its perpendicular face. These generally find 
their sources in lakes situated far back on the extended plateau above, from sixty 
to eighty miles away, and are mainly supplied by the melting of accumulated snows 
of protracted winters. Some of them, like the Montmorenci, near Quebec, pitch over 
an escarpment one hundred feet high or more. Others tumble to the sea in a series 
of falls and cascades, set back in the rock canons, which are over-topped by forested 
mountains, from which they emerge in varying moods of froth and eddj'. Others 
again make their exit by an almost continuous rapid, like a sluiceway. Most of 
them are barricaded by insurmountable walls two or three miles above their mouths, 
so that the salmon cannot ascend. At the same time, such as present a continuous 
rapid, while they are most accessible to salmon are utterly impractible for "the angler. 
The number which aflford conditions suitable for both fishes and fisherman, that is, 
a succession of pools and rapids, either for a limited distance or throughout their 
whole length is appreciably small. The Godbout is the very best of them all, both 
for its scenic attractions and its comfort, and I shall never forget the sensation of 
feeling snug when, after four days' perils were passed, we ran in under the hos- 
pitable land and anchored out of the tide and the swell which rolled in from the 
Gulf. The "Cruiser" seemed to know her holding ground instinctively, and her 
anchor chain had hardly rattled out of the boxes when a school of grampuses began 
to spout and sport alongside, and the usual attachments of boobieb and gannets 
swung out with cries and screams from the neighboring rocks to reconnoiter. At 
once Napoleon Comeau, the river guardian, came aboard from a little hamlet on 
the beach, and by dusk all the stores were on barges en route to the camp, two miles 
above. 



88 AN ANGLER'S REiMlNlSCENCES. 

I doubt if there is any other extant or will ever be taken again, for these chronicles 
which I am writing are those of a private river and not of a club holding. While 
Gilmour lived, none but invited guests ever came, and of these only three to five at 
a time, for the Godbout was reckoned as only a three-rod river, that is, it afforded 
a complement of fishing for only that many anglers, although there were no less 
than fourteen pools all told. And now that the proprietor is dead, who knows what 
changes and chances may betide? 

Up river as seen from the "Cruiser's" deck, the vista opens most charmingly, 
disclosing an expansive amphitheatre inclosed by terraced hills clad with forests of 
spruce, with the river winding through and spreading out its shallows which are 
divided by pretty wooded islands. A zig-zag path climbs to the summit of the left 
promontory, where a flagstaff sixty feet high is planted, and a rustic summer house 
affords rest and shade. Looking seaward from this point of vantage, which is a 
conspicuous landmark to navigators fifteen miles away, there is an unbroken waste 
of water as far as the eye can reach, with here and there a vessel in the offing; and 
in the foreground great combers of "surf" roll in and chase each other over the 
sandy flats. 

Multitudes of sea fowl hover over the landwash picking upon flotsam. On many 
of the higher elevations, landward, patches of snow can be seen, for June on the 
Godbout is no farther advanced than April in Montreal. The five cottages and all 
the outbuildings of the camp are in full view with half a dozen Castle-Connell cots 
or punts, aligned upon the beach in front. The largest of the cottages has a tower, 
with a chamber in the second story and a sky parlor in the third. On the ground 
floor are three chambers, a dining room and three bath rooms. Close by, the kitchen, 
ice house, fish house, etc. When the lord-proprietor arrives the Union Jack is 
hoisted on the tower, and at the close of the season it is housed again until the nexfe 
rolls round. To the gaffers and the denizens of the Nascoupie village at the anchor- 
age below, it is the prime event of the year. Earthquakes and eclipses are nothing 
to it. Such a larder and luxurious appointments as the camp possesses, few anglers 
have ever seen; nor such an equipment of rods, reels, lines, flies, gaffs, wading 
stockings, weighing scales, score books and slates, face protectors, fly oil and the 
like. When summer finally breaks in, it usually does by the middle of June, the 
blackflies are "the very devil," and nothing in nature so much tries the angler's 
temper and patience. Can the mere novice imagine a person standing helpless for 
forty minutes, with both hands holding the rod, while he kills his fish, and the un- 
conscionable insects attacking him on every exposed part of the body? No writer 
ever did justice to the dilemma. 

Gilmour used to say that there were no rivers in Scotland like the Godbout for 
"wickedness," and he always enjoyed testing the mettle of strangers. Killing and 
securing a salmon in a quiet stream is quite a different performance from bringing 
one to gaff in an impetuous rives like the Godbout, for there the labor is excessive, 
and the utmost tact is often required to save a fish. From its source to its mouth 
it is a turbulent stream, tumbling and careering through gloomy mountain gorges 
with a continuous pitch, and piling itself into billows of foam against huge holders 
which obstruct its tortuous channels. It seems a marvel how the salmon can ever 
work their way to their spawning grounds in the upper stream. 

The limits of the fishing is at what is called the "Upper Pool," where the long 
pent waters rush downward through a rock cut sixty feet deep with an impetuous 
discharge and spread out into a broad basin just under the shadow of an inpinging 
mountain. After whirling for a while in an inky eddy flecked with bubbles and 



A JUNE RISE ON THE GODBOUT. 89 

foam, it jams itself against a confronting cliff, and then dashes ofi again as im- 
petuously as before, though in a broader and more shallow channel. Below, the 
shores are nearly vertical all the way, fringed with trees. The bed is choked with 
boulders, and the air is damp with the spray which rises from the churning waters. 
It is whiteness all the way to the camp, save where temporary pauses are made at the 
pools, which I dare say are most acceptable and necessary halting places for the 
salmon in the tedious ascent. Following the bank of the river a path has been con- 
structed through the woods with much difficulty and expense, so as to communicate 
with the pools which would otherwise have been inaccessible. Trees have been 
chopped away and rocks blasted out, hewn logs stretched across chasms, hollows 
filled up with stones and earth, hand rails placed where the brink is dizzy and the 
footing precarious, jetties of stone built up around projecting cliffs which bar the 
passage. Drinking cups are found at cold, wayside springs, which trickle down 
the moss-grown rocks. At two- of the pools long ladders are laid over boulders in 
the foaming mid stream in order to reach to points of vantage for casting. At other 
pools punts are moored for special service there. At one place, halfway down the 
stream, a crossing is efifected by a rope ferry, which traverses the foot of an angry 
rapid to a landing cut in the solid rock, whence an iron railing assists the ascent up 
the bank. The expense of all these aids and improvements was great. Surely here 
the luxury of salmon fishing must be enjoyed. And yet mishaps are numerous, and 
once Milford, the Earl of Dufferin himself got a ducking at the "shea." It is a 
"wicked" river. 

Rivers are gauged as I have intimated, according to their capacity to afiford good 
angling for a given number of rods. When a party is on a river, certain pools or 
divisions are assigned to each rod day by day, and these pools are fished in rotation 
so that all have equal chances. The run of salmon begins about the middle of June, 
though a few fish sometimes arrive earlier. They come in detachments with each tide, 
and an experienced hand can generally tell whether the arrival be large or smalL 
In the early part of the season the rivers are very high from the melting of the 
snow, and back on the table lands, so that the lower pools afiford good sport at low 
tide, but as the flood gradually subsides and diminishes in volume the lower pools 
within reach of tide water become useless because they are shallow at low tide and 
salt at high tide. In neither case will salmon take the fly. It is apparent that an 
early run is most desirable, for the river is then likely to be full with the spring 
flood, and the fishing range is much extended. Average weight of Godbout salmon 
is eleven pounds. In many other rivers it is double and over. However, it is a 
prolific river, the catch in one given year exceeding oO'O fish to five rods, aggregat- 
ing a weight of 5,200 pounds. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



ANENT THE SALMON. 



In casting about among the many angling books which have been written I 
discover that the literature of the salmon is for the most part painfully hackneyed. 
Every author is voiced alike. There is the same theme, similar treatment, and one 
uniform arrangement. Each book aspires to be a "complete" treatise, and every 
one is oracular. Classes are formed, the impresario comes to the front, and every 
scholar is expected to toe the mark. Then follow, by rote, the biology of the fish, 
his habits and characteristics, and "when, how and where to capture him," con- 
cluding with some wild anecdote or bit of poetry by way of a snapper. No detail 
is omitted. All the elements are presented. If any variation is attempted, it runs 
into the speculative and mysterious. The study becomes as classical and occult as 
Madame Blavatsky's theosophy. The ways of a salmon seem past finding out. 
The more abstruse and empirical the treatise is, the more eminent becomes the phil- 
osopher; and the stronger his "pull" on the credulity of his readers, the higher the 
price of the book and the wider the play of his fancies. Yet the guild of anglers 
has stood listening and entranced for eighteen centuries. Strange that so much 
inspiration can be drawn from a single string! But is it not time we had a new 
version? 

I have Lad faith that a master spirit might yet appear who would aerate the 
pool, and place himself in such perfect touch with his readers that when he leads 
one to the river side (in his mind), be it adept or novice, he will be able to imbue 
him with the full power of the subtle sentiment which animates the pastime of 
salmon fishing. By such quality he may evoke all the possibilities of the theme, 
and we shall have not only the uitrinsic melody, but the full symphony. By som'^. 
sort of mental metathesis he will put his pupil in the place of himself. He will 
guide him to the swirling pool and point out the exact spot in the curl of the rapid 
where he shall toss his fly. He will act as mentor to him all the way through, 
precisely as if he were in bodily presence beside him — the only difference being that 
instead of jogging his elbow here and giving a timely hint there, the angler will be 
left entirely to the exercise of his own judgment and discretion when he conies to 
wield the wand. Given a manual of tactics for an infinite number of hypothetical 
situations, prescribing for each a process, and coupling whys with wherefores, and 
causes with effects, he vvill have full liberty to make his own selection of materials 
and methods. He pays his money for his information, and he takes his choice; 
only he may not be able to catch any fish ! However, no writer that I know of, save 
one, has ever exhibited the rare faculty required to produce a true vade-mecum 
for the salmon fisher, and he, unfortunately for the craft, seldom airs his knowledge 
through the medium of cold type. If he only would put it to practical test? No 
one can afford to go salmon fishing nowadays unless he has a mint of money; and 
the man who does go has his object lessons right before him. What need has he of 
'•>ooks when he can have realism? Substance is better than the semblance. And of 
what value are books to the multitude who are disbarred ? Angling books have had 
their day. Nowadays the canoe-man does all the coaching. Very few salmon 
anglers undertake the rough work of the old school. They do not care to pit their 

(90) 



ANENT THE SALMON. 91 

mettle against the temper of what Scotchmen call "wicked rivers," where the capture 
of a heavy salmon is a test of true strategic cleverness and physical endurance rather 
than of mere mechanical manipulation. Most of their fishing is done from canoes 
or boats on glassy and streamy water, with two canoemen to handle the craft. 
They have spent fortunes to secure their rivers and equip their sumptuous cottages 
which have taken the place of primitive camps, and it has taken time and money 
to reach the delectable ground. They do not propose to work their passage leading 
the horse. Therefore, as has been stated, the boatmen do all the work. They 
carry the gentleman's rod and wraps and rubber cushion to the canoe by the river 
side, and make him snug on a seat amid-ships. Then they pole out to the middle 
of the stream or the most likely portion of the pool, which they all know like a 
book, and drop killick to hold the canoe in position. They suggest the most killing 
flies, for they are thoroughly posted by critical observation, and the angler makes up 
his cast accordingly, and pitches it at the spot to which he is directed. Boatmen 
instantly detect a novice, and thenceforward lose no time in working their varnish. 
They show him how to cast properly, and how to pump the rod in order to attract 
the fish, and how to fasten to a rise. No person more able and ready to coach than 
they. Sometimes they will take the rod in hand themselves, and deliver the line in 
a way to astonish the tyro. If a fish fastens, they hand the rod back to the angler, 
then up killick at once and follow the fish with the boat, snubbing or humoring it 
according to its moods. These tactics amount to the play of an automatic reel, 
and the angler has only to keep the tip of his rod well up, except when the fish 
jumps; the boatmen "do the rest." If the fish jumps, the tip dips responsively. else 
the salmon will free himself. Each crew takes personal pride in the achievements 
of its canoe, and of the trophies it returns to the camp, all of which are credited 
to the patron of the boat, whoever kills them. Usually the boatmen tire the fish 
out in twenty minutes or so by skillful navigation, and gafif him alongside of the 
canoe ; but if they have an experienced angler aboard, they will go ashore on 
occasion, keeping deferential silence from start to finish, and venturing no suggestion 
until the result transpires, when critical remarks are allowed to be in order. 

The foregoing is the vogue on many rivers. Boats are used wherever they 
can be, because there are many pools or more properly swims which cannot other- 
wise be reached. On rivers whose mid-channels are studded with boulders, ladders 
with boards are often laid out to the best casting stands, and from one point of 
vantage to another, so that an angler not especially expert in handhng a salmon on 
the line, can do so with excellent chances of saving him by simply following the 
course of the ladders up and down the pools, as the fish may happen to lead him. 
Canoes are generally used, but on the Godbout there are Castle Connell punts some 
twenty-six feet in length, which are very stiff and safe, even under the crucial test 
of the roughest water that any craft ought to venture into. On narrow rivers like 
the Jaquet and Charlo, which can be covered by a maximum length of cast, no 
boats are required, and on the Nepissiguit the channel pools are too strong and deep 
to be fished from canoes, and have to be reached from marginal rocks and ledges. 

Of course the style of gafifing a salmon depends much upon whether the gaff is 
handled from a canoe, a shelving beach, or a steep ledge, and the length of handle 
varies accordingly. For the rocks it may be ten feet long, and the feat of getting a 
fish securely on the iron under such disadvantages is difificult indeed. Some anglers 
invariably beach their fish when they can; others prefer to gafif from the canoe. 
None choose the rocks. It is possible for th« angler to gaff his own fish from 
boat or beach, but not from a vertical rock. Old anglers who have had unfortunate 



92 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

experience with bunglers and lost many fish are chary of strange gillies, foi there ih 
nothing more exasperating, after a forty minutes' tussle with a strong fish, than to 
have some slouch barely scratch him with the point of the iron as he wallops past an 
arm's length ofif, working up renewed energy which gives promise of a long con- 
tinuation of the fight. However, one cannot always choose his own gaffing place. 
Gravel beeaches are not conveniently at hand on most rivers. Neither can an 
angler always keep out of the water when he fishes from the shore. Says one old 
veteran: "I never wade." Doubtless. But there are rivers where you would have 
to wade or swim to follow your fish. On such wild water a gaffer is indispensable. 
One should never be in a hurry when he wishes to fix a fish on his iron. Put 
the gaff into the water as quietly as possible, and unobserved of the fish, to the 
depth of sixteen inches or so, and make the clip, point upward and inward, sharply, 
but without jerking, endeavoring to hook him just abaft the shoulders, which is the 
center of gravity. If hooked elsewhere in the body, the fish gets a big leverage with 
head or tail, and will make a ghastly rent in his flesh, if indeed he don't flop off 
altogether. Never strike a fish in the belly. Nothing is more unsightly than a 
great gaping wound, especially if the entrails protrude. I notice that a few old 
anglers have adopted a big landing net with a two-foot span, which has its advan- 
tages ; but one would think it clumsy to handle, and likely to scare the fish. Veteran 
river men invariably carry a billet with which to whack the salmon on the head as 
soon as he is lifted out of the water. It gives him a speedy quietus and a better 
flavor when eaten. Moreover a thumping fish makes a hideous noise in the bottom 
of a boat, and scares other fish away. Few anglers think of this. ■ 

Lots of things are to be borne in mind when one goes salmon fishing. One 
object is the reel. Keep your eye on the drag, and don't let the line back-lash or 
overrun. An unexpected jerk on a line will do this and make mischief in an instant 
which an hour of labor will not undo. "Striking" a salmon will lose oftener than 
win. In general, a heavy salmon hooks himself by carrying down the fly in water 
which is curly, else he is not hooked at all. To strike a salmon on a taut line when 
well down stream would be fatal to tackle. An old angler simply lifts the tip of 
his rod gently, and so tightens the line at the proper instant. In dead water, or a 
back eddy, when the fly is well under the surface, smart stroke is not only admissible, 
but necessary. When to strike, how to strike and whether to strike at all, are 
questions of the moment, not to set precept. Categorically, the whole subject of 
salmon angling is one of varied and continued practice. An angler may fish the 
same river all his life with best success, and yet fail to kill on a different river until 
he has studied its different idiosyncracies. It is the intensely specific characteristics 
of rivers which makes salmon fishing a superlative art and the most difficult to 
master of all piscatory attainments. A doctor might as well undertake to diagnose 
one case by the symptoms of another as for one angler to judge of the temper of 
one river by that of another. The more we fish the more surely we discover this 
truism and its parallel. One cannot always judge character by physiognomy ; we 
discover it by trial. The master hand may outline the rote and routine of an 
angler, but he cannot make an adept. Perhaps this is why an old hand is tempted 
to discard treatises. Fortunate he may be if he is not compelled to hang up his 
rod now altogether. To the "contemplative angler," still robust and hearty, but 
poor in purse, it is misery to reflect that he must yield his pastime before his day 
is run. Rivers continue to flow, and the plash of the salmon is heard in the 
stream, but he may not fish ; the priceless waters are open only to the few who can 
afford to buy. The willow wand is superseded by the golden rod. But what 



ANENT THE SALMON. 



93 



astounding sums these angling privileges command ! Ten, twenty, thirty thousand 
dollars, and even more, for a few rods of river front with a bare fortnight's fishing 
per annum! To those who have enjoyed the freedom of the river, without money 
and without price, in years gone by, the changed condition of things seems strange, 
and the question naturally comes up: How has it all happened? Has the intense 
passion for salmon fishing, whose charms all the poets and anglers have sung from 
the days of Oppian to Bethune, at last reached fever heat? Or is it merely the 
pleasure of exclusive possession that enhances value? 

I remember once coming down the Restigouche twenty odd years ago, and 
stopping at old man Merrill's over night, half way up the river. He occupied a 
small log cabin beside a splendid salmon pool, and lived a lonely life in a very humble 




ked". Salmon f}sf!/m,'/f/rdm.j, .... 

.-: mttrXiiimiiffiaiiK- 



SALMON FISHING ON THE MIRAMICHI RIVER. 



way. He was poor, but gathered no end of salmon during the season ; indeed 
became a drug at his table, and a steady diet of the pink-hued fish for forty days 
would cloy his stomach. Wishing to do the handsome act for his guest at supper, 
he graciously set before me the best his larder afforded, in his estimation, which was 
a broiled smoked herring. This seemed to be the piece de resistance. No cooked 
salmon was in sight. I was hungry for a mess of the dainty fish, for I was fresh 
on the river myself, and for hours previously as the ever dipping paddles sped us 
down the stream, I had kept thinking: "At Merrill's we will have fresh salmon." 
However, I had no occasion to feel disappointed, for I had only to express my 
desire and abundance soon appeared. I ate of the coveted viands to repletion, but 
old Merrill "allowed" that he had had so much of it all summer that he didn't think 
I would care for it. That seems to be the logic of the present status on the river. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

COME, LET US COMMUNE TOGETHER. 

Dear Old Pard — The days when we touched elbows at the desk seem not long 
ago, so swiftly do the winged years fly; yet during that fleeting interval how many 
veterans of the old craft have gone out from among us, to meet no more by the 
sunny streams of earth ! We shall see them no more until we gather at that 
shining shore, which is the boundary and beginning of a new life. For a little 
while, good friends, adieu! and joy be with you if ye stand among the blessed 
chosen ! 

I love to think of those dear old comrades, with many of whom I have 
tramped and camped a quarter of a century ago, even while their venerable heads 
had already begun to whiten; and I rejoice to feel that the pleasure of the 
retrospect is scarcely less satisfying than the pleasure of the hope which throws 
its gleam forward, even to the far-off portals of the heavenly arcana. The halo 
of their exit is hardly less radiant and beautiful than the pervading glory of the 
promise. "Blessed are the pure in heart." And who shall hereafter live to better 
illustrate by their pure lives and simple manners the goodness which so often 
germinates and thrives among the sinful rocks and tares? 

Thanks be to the Creator who has so ordained the laws of nature that the 
longest and best lives are vouchsafed to those who find their chosen quest and 
pleasure in the open air! No tree of evil grows in the Eden of the angler; but 
vigor of mind, elasticity of limb, amiability of manner, loving kindness, content- 
ment and healthful introspection cluster and hang like grateful fruit vipon all the 
branches everywhere. Wherefore I am enabled to rejoice that so many of the old 
guard yet remain ; that they still live to kindle new enthusiasm from the fire of the 
ancient altars, and enjoy with us their long accustomed pastime. The silver 
threads are already beginning to line your own brow, old pard, and your sturdy 
limbs don't give out the involuntary play they used to do ; yet the afflatus within 
your bosom is as mighty as ever, and you have a consciousness which needs no 
quickening. The old monitor inside gives out as full, responsive and sonorous a 
sound as if it had not already swung within its weather-beaten belfry for three 
score years and ten ! To us, who are sauntering through the valley, it is indeed 
delightful to hear "the ring of the true metal." May it chant the vespers for us, 
when finally, at eventide, we reach the still waters ! 

Now, you know how it is yourself — be a man never so old, he still can plod, 
and still can fish. Whatever other functions fail, this remains. An angler may 
outlive all his usefulness, but he can never outlive his longing for the old haunts, 
and the enjoyment of fishing, so long as he can sit in a boat and feel the nibbles, 
albeit his joints are too stiff to play the struggling captive home. And this is why 
I am constrained to write unto you, pard ; and, when I see the familiar name of 
some member of the ancient brotherhood shine forth betimes in the columns of 
your journal, to say to them: "Come, let us commune together." You remember, 
once upon a time, long ago, "when we were first acquent," how the old guard used 
to gather at the rendezvous, and what a mighty corps of new recruits there was, 
and how they seemed entirely of one faith and one consanguinity, and how all 

(94) 




WILLIAM C. HARRIS. 

EDITOR "AMERICAN ANGLER. 



COME. LET L'S COMMUNE TOGETHER. 95 

listeners were entranced when another spoke? and how we fondly hoped the 
family circle would remain unbroken for all time? It was a glorious constellation 
of contributors, each of \yhom brought individual richness to the ingathering of 
the common stock. Well, a catastrophe befell, and the hive scattered, never to 
swarm again on the old camp ground. Some, as I have said, have passed from 
life, others perhaps are dead to new associations ; yet I am indulging the earnest 
hope that those whose names and faces were once familiar may be induced to 
gather once again around a common altar, inasmuch as the "Angler" has opened 
the way by which all may enter. It was a christian thought which prompted you 
to set up the Penates again that all may re-unite to kindle the sacred flame. One 
by one I have watched the old names re-appear, and gleam out like the shining 
orbs which herald the spangling of the firmament, and I have welcomed each in 
turn with the ferver of one who hails a beacon light in the gloom. First, came 
good old "Ned Buntline" — "may his years be long and end in peace:" then the 
ever-faithful gemini Isaac McLellan and "S. C. C." then the steadfast "Al Fresco,"' 
friends Rich. Sears, "W. T." and a dozen others who have earned three score 
years of honors. Where is the rest of the old guard? Where are the veterans 
Lanman, Conway, Logan, Mosely, Brackett, Kinney, "Ted Grayson." "Asa" and 
that genial author who wrote the "Pleasures of Angling?" (Who of us have not 
experienced them?) In the "American Angler" we have a rendezvous where all 
can meet — a campfire where all can toast their shins and string the "long bow" — 
a sanctuary where the lovers of the gentle art may withdraw in quiet and close 
communion. Gentlemen it is not meet that we should live longer apart, and let the 
fires die out. Will you not renew the old love again? "Come, let us commune 
together!" Pard, I salute you! 

Charles H.\llock. 

Note. — The foregoing fraternal greeting to a brother of the angle and the jien was written 
in 1S82.— Editor. 

THE TRIBE OF ESOX. 

I have found very few anglers gifted with that nice perceptive faculty which 
enables the ichthyologist to distinguish between the several members of the esox 
family. Indeed, their distribution is so wide that it is diffiailt to obtain first speci- 
mens of each in juxtaposition, so as to compare them together. The habitat of 
the great northern pike is the Mississippi river and its tributaries, while the 
muscalonge is peculiar to the St. Lawrence and its tributaries. These are founda- 
tion data upon which I suppose it is proper to build distinctions. Pickerel (esox 
reticulatus) of maximum size are often confounded with esox lucius, while lucius 
is as often substituted for nobilior. All the written descriptions given by well- 
informed fishermen seem to fail of practical utility in establishing conclusive dis- 
tinctions when put to actual tests. It is only when the several fish are laid side 
by side that the fundamental differences become apparent. Some close observers 
go so far as to claim that there is a pike peculiar to Ohio river tributaries near 
their sources, which are confounded with both the northern pike and the St. 
Lawrence muscalonge. Recently, at the residence of Gen. Israel Garrard, in Minne- 
sota, it was my good fortune to inspect some splendid specimens of these three 
alleged varieties, which the general discussed with all the critical acumen of a 
scientific enthusiast, and I accepted his points of discrimination with the ready 
acquiescence of a disbeliever who wishes to be convinced. I submit the following 
letter, written since the interview, which may throw some light upon this vexed 



96 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

subject. You will note a reference made to a certain article which has appeared 
in the columns of The Angler, relating to this third species of pike, but which had 
escaped my notice. I quote what follows : 

"Mr. Charles Hallock : 

"My De(\r Sif — I am sorrj^ that I cannot refer you to the number of the 
American Angler containing notices of the 'Chautauqua Lake Pike,' also known 
as the 'Muskingum Pike.' and having its habitat in the tributaries of the Ohio. 
This is a pike that has not been fully recognized and described by sporting au- 
thorities, and I suppose for the reason that it has been generally called muscalonge, 
and confounded with that fish. I think that it should be named esox immaculatus, 
as the striking peculiarity of its appearance is the absence of markings or spots. 
This marks the difference between it and esox nobilior and esox lucius, as well 
as the reticulatus and fasciatus in a way that cannot be misunderstood. It is 
possible that its habitat is confined to the Mississippi and tributaries, but Roose- 
velt's account of a similar pike being found in waters of Cape Cod throws some 
doubt on this proposition. The texture of the flesh and its flavor gives it the 
highest rank among fresh water fishes. This perhaps cannot be said of any other 
of the esox family, not even the nobilior. I once saw a 28-pound specimen in a 
Chicago fish market, and where, as I expected, it was called a muscalonge. I have 
seen several notices in the Pioneer Press of anglers bringing in muscalonge from 
Clear Lake, near Anoka, but have not had an opportunity of verifying their fish. 
A marked peculiarity of what I call esox immaculatus is the very small size of 
the scales. I. Garrard. 

Note. — Tlie foregoing was written in 1883. 

CUT-THROAT TROUT. 

I went up the Rosebud Creek from the Crow Agency at Stillwater. Montana, 
in company with Agent McKeller and Clerk Charles H. Bostwick, on a trip to a 
delightful mountain lake which lies at the entrance of the Rosebud Canon. The 
lake was a temporary reservoir or interruption of the foaming torrent, which 
rushes from a snow-capped mountain which alone shuts us out from the Yellow- 
stone Park. The lake on one side was very deep, where the cliff went down plumb 
into the water. On the other side the bottom was shallow and sloping to a 
paddock of lily pads, which seemed to define the margin of deep water. It was 
an unvisited lake, and there was no boat. At the head of the lake the Rosebud 
tumbled in with a mighty rush of deep green waters over the boulders, and just 
where it debouched the liveliest trout fishing could be had. The fish averaged 
uniformly two pounds in weight, and could be caught as readily from one shore as 
the other, either in deep or shoal water. There were very few of a size below 
or above two pounds. I have never attempted to write up that trip because my 
pen could not do justice either to the sport or the marvelous scenery which we 
found there in the heart of the Rockies. I am moved to refer to it now only 
because we caught fish there which I have never seen on the same meridian or 
anywhere else. I have certainly watched angling reports ever since, in vain, to 
discover some description which applied. The trout resembled the iridea of Colo- 
rado in respect to the metallic black markings scattered like lustrous grains of 
course black powder over its shoulders and body; but it lacked the rainbow lateral 
stripe. Its distinctive feature, however, was a slash of intense carmine across 
each gill-cover, as large as my little finger. It was most striking. For lack of a 
better description we called them "cut-throat" trout. Have any of your corre- 
spondents taken any like them anywhere along the range? 

Note. — Written in 1SS4. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

ARCTIC FISHING IN SUB-TRUPICAL WATERS. 

New River, K. C, in latitude 35 degrees, never had such a chill in- its whole 
fluvial history as it experienced last month. From the 9th to the 15th of February 
the morning temperature oscillated between ten and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and 
great sheets of ice and schools of torpid fish were floating all over the surface. 
The greater proportion of these were sea trout (weak fish, of the marine family 
Sciacnidae), weighing from ten to twelve pounds apiece, but there were many small 
rock fish, besides a considerable variety of fresh-water pan fish. They were all so 
benumbed with cold that they could be lifted out of the water with the hands, and 
were practically within reach of all who chose to come and take them. 

To the poor and unemployed the occasion was a Godsend, while every one else 
without distinction who could hire a boat or scow, or improvise a raft, went out 
fishing. Those who were industrious and well equipped made big fares, for the 
cold snap which pervaded the entire country from the Atlantic to the Pacific sent 
prices up two or three hundred per cent., and the local fish dealers and packers bad 
to hump themselves to supply the great metropolitan markets. Ordinary business 
was suspended, labor could not be hired at any price, steamboat crews dallied on 
their regular trips and picked up hundreds. The big lumber mills at Jacksonville, at 
the head of navigation, which had been running gangs of 150 men day and night, 
were obliged to shut down because the saw logs froze up in the booms, and all went 
fishing. Trains from Newbern and Wilmington brought down a good many fisher- 
men. One lad of fourteen years earned $32 cash in two hours. One man caught 
3,000 fish in five hours, which he sold to the dealers for $240. The aggregate catch 
ran up to 50,000 fish. Regulation methods were discarded, while baskets, dip-nets, 
small seines, rakes, pitchforks and oyster tongs were brought into use. Dealers 
bought freely all that were. offered. They did not so much mind enhanced prices 
because they could procure unlimited supplies of ice at the cost of gathering it from 
the rivers. Some boatmen earned three or four dollars a day at this work. Hun- 
dreds of tons were obtained in upstream waters where the rivers were frozen solid 
to the depth of three or four inches. These surfaces were covered with skaters O'f 
both sexes, and assumed a truly Minnesota appearance ; orders for skates were sent 
north by telegram and returns were impatiently awaited, but the amateurs were in 
bad form and the execution below par. Such boreal phenomena are not likely to 
be repeated in a hundred years, unless the sunspots enlarge and the solar heat be 
minimized, for New River is not a fluvial freak subject to caprices of the frost king, 
but a legitimate ward of the "Sunny South" (so named in poesy), whose shores are 
clad with bright-leaved verdure the winter through, inviting picnics and siestas- 
Magnolias, holly, bay, myrtle and thirty other evergreens simulate the summer 
season, on those warm days when the haze and sunlight are upon it, and it is then 
that the visitor from the north is wont to write letters of condolence to those 
detained at home to shiver in frigid atmospheres. So much is one's enjoyment 
enhanced by meretricious contrasts and comparison. 

From a point where the Wilmington, Newbern and Norfolk Railroad crosses 
the river, the stream follows a sinuous course tbroi\gh the woods for a couple of 

(i»7) 



98 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

miles, with many a cove and pocket, where large black bass may be caught with 
bait, spoon, or bob of hair and feathers on almost any warm day throughout the 
year. It then broadens into an expansive estuary which averages three miles in 
width, and so continues for thirty miles seaward to Brown's Sound, whose brackish 
waters come up to mingle with the outflow of the upland swamps, replenished 
diurnally by the ocean tides which flow in through the inlet, giving abundant nour- 
ishment to many kinds of anadramous and fresh-water fish, which are seined by 
the ton and carried daily to the Newbern and Wilmington markets, as well as to a 
great variety of luscious oysters, crabs and terrapins. There is no such nursery 
for fish of all sorts and proclivities as New River and White Oak River adjacent. 
I have seen the drag nets capture at one haul both large and small-mouth black 
bass, rockfish, blue and yellow catfish, mud cats, yellow perch, white perch, chin- 
quapins, red horse, mullets, sunfish or robins, white and hickory shad, branch 
herring, red drum, shots, weak fish, pickerel and garfish ; and once, at the Newbern 
annual fair, which occurs every February, there were eighty varieties of sea and 
inland fish displayed, all fresh caught from neighboring waters, besides nineteen 
varieties of oysters. A happy combination of sound, river, estuary, ocean and 
inflowing creeks, and a meeting of tidal fluvial currents has made the waters 
of Eastern North Carolina the most prolific nursery and pasture ground for edible 
fish of all places on the coast. Early in February white shad began running, and 
with the melting of the ice and warm weather which ensued, the run waxed heavy. 
Herring will follow the shad, and seining for both species will be active until the 
middle of May. Seines are operated in some localities by steam, and $10,000 profit 
has been realized by a single fishery during the season. As many as 180,000 herring 
and 3,000 shad have been captured at a single haul. Some seines with the ropes 
attached make a circuit of a mile. An outfit for fifty men costs |25,000. 

Besides seines gill nets are used for catching shad, which, stretched on poles 
lengthwise of the river, sometimes extend for a mile or more. And all the way 
up the rivers are fishing stands made of poles or planks projecting from the banks, 
where negroes stand with long-handled dipnets, and scoop the fish as they ascend to 
spawn, sometimes lifting out as many as half a dozen at a time, worth 75 cents per 
pair. Occasionally rude windlasses are seen, fashioned of unpeeled logs and poles, 
and used for hauling drag nets, and there are also stake nets set across the mouths 
of tributary creeks. Every settler along the riverside makes full use of his riparian 
rights in this respect, and for a month past fishermen have been making big 
earnings, two crews of ten men each having divided $700 in one instance as the 
net profits of twenty-four hours' fishing. 

As to angling for sport, pure and simple, it is an unknown art in these waters. 
In December a great many weak fish or sea trout are caught with hooks and 
handlines, and during extraordinary runs, such as occur periodically, hosts of ama- 
teurs, including ladies, join the ranks of piscatory professionals. This fishing is 
done in the vicinity of Beaufort and Morehead City, on the beach. In the fall 
there is some lively trolling for bluefish, and in spring for Spanish mackerel, off 
the beach, but river angling is almost unpracticed. Occasionally a venerable negro 
will take his rickety old punt and steal away to a favorite bend in the stream, 
where there is a deep hole and a stake to tie to, and sit so quietly that his russet 
garb can hardly be distinguished from the dead grass of the marsh which lies 
alongside. But sportsmen are seldom seen on the rivers. Natives do not under- 
stand fly fishing and other scientific methods, and northern anglers have not yet 
found their way hither. When they do they will have a rich experience. All 



ARCTIC FISHING IN SUB-TROPICAL WATERS. 99 

through April the bass fishing is superb, but I would not encourage angling in ^Nlay. 
which is the spawning season. 

New River is no marsh-lined, reed-bordered alligator creek like many streams 
on the southern seaboard,' but a delectable broad water, with bold wooded shores, 
which are interrupted by occasional fresh-water creeks and umbrageous promon- 
tories, which are successively unfolded to the enraptured gaze as the excursionist 
proceeds on his voyage in steamboat or naphtha launch; and all along this beautiful 
estuary club houses, shooting boxes and villas have taken possession of advantageous 
sites. Conspicuous on the water front is the "Glencoe Stock Farm," operated by 
Thos. A. Mclntyre, Esq., of the New York Produce Exchange, bearing some 
similitude to Mt. Vernon on the Potomac, with its pretty waterside pier, steam 
launch, pleasure yachts, cozy waiting house, flight of 100 steps surmounting the 
wooded heights, and carriage road winding by graded ascent through a natural 
gkn. Within the year, since the completion of the W. N. & N. Railroad, of which 
Mr. Mclntyre is president, traffic has grown to proportions which command the 
unremitting services of two large freight and passenger steamboats, with accom- 
modating docks and warehouses at two points. One of these wharves is 662 feet 
long. Government improvements are being pushed at various points. Game is 
quite as abundant as fish. Geese, ducks, brants and other wild fowl congregate 
along the margins of the sounds and at the mouths of estuaries. Deer and wild 
turkeys are in the timber. Partridges and quail are found in the old fields and 
plantitions. Bears are the pests of farmers by their nocturnal visitation to hog 
pens. Coons and 'possums are abundant. 

I am somewhat particular in detail, because I believe New River to be the 
coming winter and summer resort, by its supervening natural attractions, its equable 
but bracing climate, and the accessibility with which it can now be reached from all 
points. Hitherto it has been little frequented, but the development of many new 
industries, and the investment of large capital right there is bound to bring it into 
notice. There are good hotel accommodations at Jacksonville, the county seat of 
Onslow, and a thrifty village. If the visitor would wish to make headquarters at 
Newburn, it is within an hour and a half by rail. 

Note. — This chapter was written in March, jS9,'). — Editor. 



CHAPTER XX. 



THE NEW DISPENSATION OF FISHES. 



In the middle of last April, when the incoming steamers from Europe re- 
ported icebergs adrift off the New Foundland Banks, sagacious minds predicted 
marine phenomena of marked character. The presence of these bergs two months 
in advance of their usual appearance indicated warm weather in the polar zone, 
as well as the projection of an Arctic current into a portion of the South Atlantic 
hitherto dominated by the Gulf Stream. Subsequent investigations by intelligent 
sailing masters discovered that the Gulf Stream had been so encroached upon by 
a cold current as to force it 600 miles out of its course. As this influx of ice 
water showed a temperature of 32°, it became easy to account for the long and 
backward spring, the cold, foggy and rainy weather which beset our eastern coast 
line until as recently as the 1st of June. Its. effect was seriously felt as far south 
as the Capes of Delaware. Furthermore, it was a logical inference that such 
great changes must exert an important effect upon the marine fauna, introducing 
new species from the northern seas, and perhaps temporarily driving off some 
species long recognized as local and indigenous to the waters whose temperature 
had been thus suddenly chilled. Another natural consequence would be to intro- 
duce vast supplies of fish food in new variety, to replenish a very sensible deple- 
tion long since discovered to exist upon the old feeding grounds of our best 
known commercial fishes, and thereby to invite their return to those resorts long 
frequented by the fishing fleets. Present results are justifying these conclusions. 

For a dozen years past there has been a marked dearth of cod, mackerel, 
herring and other varieties of fish, with poor fares and indifferent catches all 
along the shore and banks. Causes visible and unknown combined to produce this 
depletion. Fishermen had almost begun to despair of success, and were preparing 
to seek other employments, when, by one of those opportune operations of nature 
which can seldom be anticipated, fortune suddenly rolled in on the flood tide of 
the Arctic current; and now they are finding abundance instead of dearth. All 
vessels are coming in with full fares, bringing reports of fish crov\?ding the ledges 
and marine meadows of their old haunts, and carrying joy all along the coast 
where livelihoods are gained by the hook and trawl. Bluefish, weakfish, mackerel, 
cod, striped bass, halibut, and nearly all varieties are being caught a month earlier 
than usual, and instead of striking at successive points along the coast as has been 
their habit, and working their way from southern waters to points northward, 
they seem to have invaded the whole coast simultaneously from Nova Scotia to 
the Chesapeake. 

No doubt a change of water and a change of temperature will work out other 
results equally beneficial and less expected. As has been intimated, species whose 
habitat has been restricted to other localities, are likely to be taken on new 
grounds hitherto unfrequented by them. Their distribution will be widely 
extended. Possibly the lobster, now so nearly exterminated, will reappear in 
increased size and numbers. Even the gigantic marine fauna — the norwhal, the 
whale, the sea lion and the walrus — may return to the haunts they frequented 
three hundred years ago, and their presence as far south as Long Island Sound 

(100) 



THE NEW DISPENSATION OF FISHES. 101 

become no longer a novelty. Oysters, clams and other shellfish may be stimulated 
by an infusion of new diet and new materials for vigorous growth to increased 
reproduction. There is no need to the speculative benefits which are likely to 
result from the temporary displacement of the Gulf Stream by the polar current. 
Whether it will soon resume its old channel, or whether the change is an initial 
to mark a new climatic epoch like that which converted the Greenland of the 
early Norsemen into an icy and sterile tract, is a problem which may well be 
contemplated with more than ordinary interest. 

Note.— Written in 1883. 

THE EXPERT ANGLER. 

Assuredly "bookish wisdom" and finical acquirements do not make the fisher- 
man. Militia soldiers on dress parade may present as effective an appearance as 
veteran regulars, but something besides toggery and efficiency in the manual of 
arms is required to make a good fighter. An angler with superfine tackle and rig 
may astonish the natives by his professional make-up, but unless he "understands 
the habits of the fish and the character" of the water he fishes, he will make but 
a poor fist of his angling. His ingenious manipulation of the rod will scare more 
fish than it will attract, and all his frequent changing of flies and monkeying with 
his patent shop contrivances will only lessen his chances of filling his creel. If a 
gunner be restless and uneasy in the "blind," you may be sure the geese will veer 
and fly high. 

There is a closer analogy between hunting and fishing than many people affect 
to believe. I am always surprised when I do not perceive the same caution 
exercised in approaching the denizens of the rivers as the fauna of the forests. 
The ostrich with his head in the sand is not more foolish than the man who 
fancies the fish cannot see him because he cannot see them. A practiced eye will 
detect a motionless fish or a glancing flash in the stream where one who is unac- 
customed is unable to discover it after it is plainly pointed out. One should 
approach an eligible part of the stream with unvarying discretion, even though it 
appears to be barren. Hundreds of soi disant anglers ruin their chances at the 
outset by the clumsy manner in which they approach the timid creatures which 
they propose to entice and lay hands on. If market gunners behaved in like 
manner, utterly ignoring the first principles of drawing on game, our city epicures 
would get no canvasback ducks. A great deal more is included in a "knowledge 
of habits" than consists in the mere superficial understanding of what fish eat, 
how they live and what will attract them best or bring them safe to creel. If it 
be true of the forest, it is equally true of the brooks, that too much beating about 
the bush defeats its ends. The silent hunter or angler, and quiet methods, secure 
the goodlier results. If opinionated tyros only knew by what great painstaking 
baskets are sometimes filled, they would discover that they have something yet to 
learn in order to attain the acme of high art. A farmer's boy will crawl on his 
belly for twenty yards in order to get at a big trout under the bank, and ten to 
one he will yank him out. Herein he develops several requisite qualities of a true 
angler. He is familiar with fish habits, and he exercises caution and patience — 
without which success would be impossible. It is by the application of these that 
the tow string is able to discount the silk line and reel. Books do not impart 
the practical information which that lad possesses. I once met a party on the 
Nepigon, late in the season, who had been fishing all the choice places along shore 
where fish abound earlier, and had taken'none. I took them in a canoe to a riff 



102 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

in midstream, where a small island divided the current, and they caught a boat 
load. You see, a man may be a prize winner at a fly-casting tournament and yet 
have no "luck" on the streams. 

It is not my purpose in these desultory notes to discuss low-grade and high- 
grade angling. Of course a masterly cast with the fly will pick up a fish which a 
gob and wattles can't reach. We all understand that, and we have long been 
familiar with the logic which, from the days of Saladin, prefers dexterity to brute 
force, commending that which soars above the thing which grovels. I am simply 
trying to show where those who attempt to practice high-grade angling are 
deficient, and that many who talk by the book are but bunglers in the manual art. 
It is not every man who can talk horse that is able to keep his saddle or handle 
the reins. Some pretenders may have the written code at their tongue's end, 
whereby they mystify the credulous ; but they never can deceive a veteran. An 
expert can read them off-hand and detect their short-comings the instant they 
step toward the animal to take hold of the rein or put a foot in the stirrup. It is 
so with the man who handles rod or paddle. It is not necessary to take him to 
the river side to size him up. An apparently insignificant movement will give him 
away. It is the same with the man who takes hold of a gun or ax, billiard cue, 
foil or Indian club ; who steps into a carriage or a boat, or enters a drawing 
room. Ignorance cannot be disguised. It is the companion of awkwardness, and 
the two go always hand in hand. 

One chief reason why most trout anglers fail is because they don't keep their 
eyes on their work. I do not believe that a short-sighted individual can be 
perfectly successful. He must miss a great many fish that rise. An angler should 
never take his eye off the water. It should follow with constant vigilance the 
vagaries of his flies. He should retrieve his line as seldom as possible ; being sure 
always to strike the instant he thinks he detects a gleam. The motion of a trout 
is often quicker than the glance of the human eye, and unless the angler is on the 
alert the trout will have seen and investigated the lure before a contemptuous flap 
of the tail has made the angler aware that he has come and gone. Often an 
upward lift of the rod tip will hook a fish whose presence was not suspected at 
all, the barb fastening to its tail, side or gill. Such incidents as these have given 
rise to the notion that trout knocked the flies into their mouths with their tails. 

One object of wading a stream is to avoid observation. Proper wading is the 
most deliberate operation imaginable. A good wader will scarcely roil the water 
in a mill tail. He will often pick up a score of fish without moving more than a 
couple of rods. The fish will so little heed him that they play about his legs. I 
have often waded through a school collected in a long reach of fairly deep water, 
and then getting out on the bank and going back to the beginning, fished the same 
pool a second and third time with tolerable success. Wading also enables the 
angler to cover water that he could not otherwise reach, and it permits him to 
fish with a short line. It is a great mistake to fish with a line that is not under 
complete control. There is a great difference between stream fishing and pond 
fishing. I seldom attempt a long cast. The more line one lays on a still surface 
the shyer the fish become. A long line is like a long-range sharpshooter's tele- 
scope rifle — intended to bring game where less effective weapons fail. A thirty- 
yard or even twenty-yard line, laid evenly out on the wings of a masterly cast, is 
an exquisite performance, but the accomplishment is seldom of practical use in 
angling. 

I remember once an amusing incident at Ridgewood, Long Island, where a 




HON. ROBERT B. RouSKXKLT, 

ANGLER AND AUTHOR. 



THE NEW DISPENSATION OF FISHES. 103 

visitor was permitted to fish an artificial pond of liver-fed trout, which were in 
the habit of rushing en masse after anything thrown in, until they fairly made the 
water boil. Of course they were not afraid of man at feeding time, though they 
were a little shy on off hours, and of course our ambitious angler took a fine trout 
at the very first cast, standing in full view upon the bank. If he had had a 
"trot" line he could have taken two dozen on as many hooks. After playing him 
well to creel, enjoying the suspense of a well-hooked captive for several minutes, 
he cast again, expecting a repetition of the same old rush, but nary rush did he 
perceive. A fingerling or two broke gingerly at his tail fly, but the most persistent 
persuasion failed to fasten another trout. 

Haec fabula docet that dead failures are possible in the best stocked waters, 
and that the shoemaker is worthy of his last — or words to that effect. 

HON. ROBERT B. ROOSEVELT IN ANGLING LITERATURE. 

1 am convinced that the Hon. Robert B. Roosevelt has not had full credit for 
the very important part he has occupied in the American anglers' guild, especially 
during the civil war period, when the young men of the land, and old ones, too, 
were too much engaged on the battlefields to spare time for sport, except it were 
to eke out an occasional deficient ration for the camps by whatever game and fish 
could be caught during temporary cessation of hostilities. Mr. Roosevelt was 
the living intermediate who bridged the interval between Frank Forester and the 
writer, whose "Fishing Tourist" (1873) and "Sportsman's Gazette" (1877) 
brought the angling literature of America to its climax and was so attested by 
Gill and Jordan. How comprehensive and aptly this history has been presented 
in bibliography may be ascertained by reference to the columns of the London 
Field (3 papers), for June and July, 1887, under the title above given. The com- 
piler, in his review of the period indicated, allows that "nothing like a compre- 
hensive manual of angling was published until 1864, when Thad Norris' 'American 
Angler's Book' and Robert B. Roosevelt's 'Game Fish of the North' both came 
out." That was during the year of the first lease of a Canadian salmon river, the 
Nepissiguit. Roosevelt's book made especial reference to that famous stream in 
its chapter on salmon fishing, itself a new revelation to the fraternity of fishermen. 
How to fish for salmon and the implements to be used, and a description of the 
sport, had never been presented before. The volume was a godsend to anglers, 
for it included the technology of angling, fly-fishing, tackle-making, entomology, 
fish culture, camping out, etc. It described new devices, new methods, and new 
fields of sport which had come into the purview during the sixteen years that had 
intervened since the enterprising J. J. Brown had prepared his "American Anglers' 
Guide" (1849). Moreover, it introduced new species of fishes not previously 
regarded for sport and identified others which had been in doubt. The whole 
subject was in chaos at that time, scientifically considered. Experts had not even 
quite determined whether a brook trout and a samlet (parr) were the same, or 
that brook trout were not in fact immature salmon. The scientific world has 
moved since then mainly by the contributions of men here present. 

In 1865, the year following his first production, Mr. Roosevelt put out a 
supplementary book entitled "Superior Fishing," relating chiefly to the fishes of 
the Great Lakes, and touching the lately mooted subject of fish protection. These 
two books, as well as my "Fishing Tourist" and Prime's "I Go a-Fishing" (1873), 
were all published by the Harper Brothers. 

Not only must Mr. Roosevelt be recognized as a well informed author of 
undoubted accuracy and reliability, but he was foremost with Agassiz, Baird, 
Garlock, Ainsworth, Samuels, Prime and Mather. 



CHAPTER XXL 



BOBBING FOR EELS. 



Speaking of eels, Mr. Editor, I don't know of anything that will make 
a worse mess in a boat full of hamper and loose lines than a big, active eel, 
fresh drawn from the mud. It is not so much that he twists everything 
into an inextricable snarl, but he befouls everything he touches with a 
viscous slime which nothing but drying in the hot sun will effectually 
remove. Of course, in trying to clear the tangle, the slime gets on one's 
hands, and when they are once besmeared you are comparatively helpless — 
Frenchmen would say hors du combat; in fact, a foreign language can 
alone express the predicament. 

Perhaps you know how it is yourself? Eel slime! Slippery is no 
name for it. It is slicker than goose grease and as sticky as fly-paper. 
Did you ever try to turn a door-knob with your hands soaped? It didn't 
turn, did it? But you could let go all the same? Well, eel slime sticks 
while it slips. It is fast and loose at the same time. It holds on while it 
lets go. Its ambiguity is as queer as the Irishman's frog which stands up 
when he sits down. You can no more unsnarl a coiled line with an eel in 
it than you can eat soup with a fork. If you are new to eels, or eels are 
new to you, you are likely to persist in the effort until you are as hope- 
lessly involved as a fly in a web. The eel will thread loops and bights 
faster than you can open them out. He will thrust his head through one 
ganglion and his tail through another, and then tie himself into a running 
bowline, and reeve himself through the turn of the knot, and come out 
both ways at once. And your hands are getting slippier and stickier all 
the time. You cannot hold on to the eel, and the line won't let go of your 
fingers. Your only recourse is to cut it off as close to the snarl as you 
can and throw the whole mess overboard together. 

But one can seldom get ofif so easily. Voila! When the line has 
taken several turns around the painter, and over and under the cleats, 
and through the handle of the water-jug, and over botn oars, the only 
alteratives are, either to knock the boat to pieces, or cut everything loose 
with your jack-knife. Of course the knife is in your pocket, for, being a 
novice, you haven't thought to leave it handy on the thwart, and the 
quandary is how to get it out and open without daubing your clothes and 
the knife, and splitting your thumb nail. In any event there can be but 
one solution of the gordian knot, and one series of results, and these are 
a much-soiled suit, a spoiled holiday, an irrepressible eel, and a score of 
two-feet lengths of cut line useless for shoestrings and not strong enough 
for reef points. 

As a matter of fact, no one but a tyro will angle for eels unless he is 
properly equipped and prepared. Fishing for eels, Secundem artem, as 
an expert fisher, is one thing to catch one by chance, while fishing' for 
other fish, is quite another matter. If ever an old fisherman becomes 
involved with an eel, the incident takes him quite unawares. No greater 

(104) 



BOBBING FOR EELS. 105 

misfortune can befall an angler in a boat; but he is always equal to the 
emergency. When an eel-sharp discovers what he has on his line, he 
summons to his aid his cutest expedients. He first clears all hamper 
from the bottom of his boat, and then lifting the eel dexterously over the 
gunwale, slips his foot on to his neck as he falls squirming to the boards, 
and deftly disengages the hook; or, if the hook be gorged, he cuts the 
line, or even amputates the head, care being taken to throw the body 
overboard forthwith, or else to place it where its prolonged contoritions 
can do no mischief. The most expeditious and approved method of deal- 
ing with such hard cases is practiced in the West Indies, where the moray, 
which is the most obstreperous of all eels, is hauled head-foremost into a 
smack's scupper, and then clubbed as soon as ever his head appears in- 
board. This moray is armed with wicked teeth, and his vicious attempts 
to bite make him a two-fold terror. 

I used to know something about eels when I was a boy, and I fished 
for them con amore, especially those sweet salt-water eels, not of inord- 
inate size, but just large enough to be good when cut into three-inch 
sections, rolled in corn meal or bread-crumbs, and fried brown. Many 
an appetizing" meal have I made ofif fried eels at Nettleton's on Morris 
Cove, and down at Five Mile Point, in New Haven harbor, and around at 
Double Beach, and at Malachi King's at Branford, in the old days. The 
head of the harbor is shoal, and when the tide is out it leaves broad mud 
flats which harbor shellfish in variety and profusion. 

Between the sand-beach and the flats was a ribbon of mussel-beds 
and sedge, with an upright face eighteen inches high toward the water. 
When the tide made, and the young flood had filled the head of the 
harbor so that the depth of the water was even with the top of the 
sedge, and all the barnacles and kelp which overlaid it began to seethe 
and hiss with the gently-lapping waves of the advancing tide, I used to 
moor a flat-bottomed skiff so that it would tail in toward the shore, and 
near enough to permit me to toss a line in under the breast of the mussel- 
bed; there sitting in -the stern I caught eels galore. 

The best time to fish was in mid-summer at the full of the moon, but 
I could discount all legitimate methods of setting a lantern in the stern- 
sheets on a dark night, with a southerly wind blowing up the harbor. 
Then the eels would come up to the surface in schools and play about 
the boat near enough to be touched with the hand. I could have scooped 
a score at a time with a dip-net, but, scorning mean advantages, took them 
fairly. I used a stout ten-foot handline with a bob of earth-worms, and 
I had only to haul them in as fast as they caught on, lift them over the 
gunwale, and slat them into a bushel basket placed conveniently at hand. 
Assuredly, it was great sport. Seldom did one gorge the bait, or tangle 
his teeth, so that the process was simple. Naturally I became quite an 
adept in threading worms with broom-straws and bunching them into 
attractive bobs of red-ripe lusciousness which was hard for eels to resist. 

I never knew of but one lure to beat earth-worms. The same 
reminds me of the eel-pots I used to set -off shore, marking their location 
with buoys so that I could visit them at flood tide and boat their wriggling 
contents. These pots were wicker cylinders thirty inches long by a foot 
in diameter, with a funnel in one end, and were baited with what would 
most attract. . Ofifal was perhaps better than anything else. 

Note. — This chapter was written by Mr. Hallock in 1886. — Editor. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



WHY FISH DON T ALWAYS BITE. 



The subjoined extract is made from an anonymous letter printed in 1885. It 
is a most instructive contribution, as the facts gleaned have been obtained from 
continuous observation of the habits of fish in feeding. The fish in question are 
black bass confined in a large glass tank or aquarium nine feet long by two feet 
wide, and two and a half feet in depth. The writer describes their manners and 
methods when served with live food, such as shiners or minnows. He says : 

"Such a meal is always a most interesting scene. If the fish are very hungry 
they will show it by an increased restlessness. They are then more alert and 
active, swimming back and forth, sometimes chasing and attacking each other. 
These encounters may be mere fish play, yet there seems to be too much temper 
in them — too much promptness to strike back for that. 

"But when the bucket of live shiners is served to them they at once come to 
order. They await no grace, only the lesser fish are supposed to await upon the 
greater, which they do with just as much filial obedience as the big fish can en- 
force. It is but a display of human selfishness on a more unreserved scale, where 
might or muscle makes the law. The large bass make the water boil as they 
dash on the huddling and terrified shiners that try in vain to elude them. Again, 
they will charge on the smaller bass to hold them back till their own wants be 
satisfied. And it takes a great deal to satisfy them, for their selfishness makes 
them gluttons, or else their honest capacity is amazing. They will gorge them- 
selves and then lay off, often for several days. Frequently those as small as two 
pounds have been observed to take from ten to fifteen two to three-inch shiners 
at one meal. This makes it tolerably safe for the shiners for at least three days. 
Their favorite feeding time is early in the morning." 

From the foregoing the reasons are made sufficiently obvious why fish bite 
freely at one time and not at another in the same water and the same locality, 
and why some anglers have "good luck" today and some have bad tomorrow. 
The fish gorge themselves and take a rest. It explains also why small fish only 
are taken at certain times when large fish are known to be abundant. It is be- 
cause they have been made to wait until the big fish have fed. Their opportunity 
comes while the latter are lethargic and quiescent with surfeit. The duration 
of the intervals between good fishing and poor fishing is ascertained, for the bass 
are frequently off their feed for several days. Meanwhile the shiners have oppor- 
tunity to multiply and develop ; at least they are improved by accessions from 
other localities, for it is notorious that they do not seem to diminish from year 
to year as a rule. There is another reason which may be added to explain good 
fishing one day and poor fishing the next, to wit: the nomadic habits of the 
minnows, which shift their locality from time to time, the big fish, of course, 
following them. Good judgment would therefore instigate an observant angler 
to try a different stand in another part of the fishing ground, if, he gets no bites 
today where he had success the day before. 

We find also from our friend's observation what experience had already 
taught us, that the morning is the proper time for fishing. Indeed, of late years 

(100) 



WHY FISH DON'T ALWAYS BITE. 107 

I have wasted no hours between 11 o'clock a. m. and 4 or 5 o'clock p. m. There 
is usually a good spurt in the evening, when fish bite freely. 

WINTKR-KILLED FISHES. 

People are often puzzled to account for the mortality among fishes, which 
are frequently found dead in large numbers, in the ocean and inland waters 
alike, and at different seasons of the year, sometimes in midsummer and some- 
times in the spring after the ice breaks up. There should be no mystery in this. 
Why should not fishes be subject, like animals, to epidemics from diseases and 
widespread death from natural causes? 

If we turn to the elements of natural history we read that fishes are cold- 
blooded vertebrates which live exclusively in water, and respire by means of gills 
instead of lungs ; and that in process of breathing, the oxygen needed is secured 
from the air which is mingled with the water. Fishes, no less than animals, are 
kept alive by air, and without it they die. The phenomenon referred to by your 
correspondent "J. G. R." in a recent issue of The Angler, where great quantities 
of pickerel were found dead in Lake Umbagog, Maine, after the ice went out 
in the spring, is one of the causes of fish mortality most easily explained. The 
fish died from want of air. 

If we place a given number of animals in a circumscribed apartment where 
no fresh air is admitted, they will exhaust the oxygen in time, and then die. In 
like manner, if a body of water is hermetically sealed by ice, the oxygen it con- 
tains will be exhausted in time, and the fish will die. But ice is porous, and unless 
it becomes solidified by intense severity of cold, air passes through it into the 
water below. Also, in temperate climates, there are usually throughout the 
winter occasional periods of thawing, by which process air is absorbed ; the ice 
along shore is also melted, and air-holes are found in the body of the ice, to 
which the fish instinctively resort, as animals would do to crevices or open windows 
in the closed apartment, and are thereby revitalized. Under such conditions no 
mortality occurs. 

Sometimes there is an unseasonable rainfall in the winter season which over- 
flows the ice of ponds or lakes ; or the feeders of those lakes may be swollen by 
a flood and overflow the ice ; and it is thus not uncommon for fish to find their 
way to the overflowed surface through the air-holes, or the open water along 
shore, seeking for air. If a hard freeze follows, these fish, becoming benumbed 
and unable to find their way back, are frozen in and remain imbedded until the 
ice finally melts in the spring and leaves their released carcasses floating on the 
surface of the water. 

Again, when the winter is ushered in by extremely cold weather, and the 
water freezes rapidly, fish will congregate at open spaces for air, keeping near 
the surface, and before they are aware of it the ice forms around them and in- 
closes them. I have seen large blocks of clear ice cut from the surface of deep 
ponds for domestic uses, containing many catfish and bull-heads, which are bottom 
fish with hibernating habits ; but the winter unexpectedly overtook them before 
they were ready to assume their torpid state and bury themselves in the mud. 
Ordinarily they would have avoided such a catastrophe. 

Some fish are more subject than others to mortality from this cause. Pickerel, 
for instance, as referred to^by your correspondent, prefer to keep on the shoals 
near shore among the aquatic plants and weeds. In winters of alternate thawing 
and freezing, they would be even better off there than in the deeper waters, be- 



108 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

cause the ice would occasionally become broken along shore, and the plants them- 
selves supply oxygen; but calamities come when most guarded against, and the 
pickerel of Umbagog may have been inclosed by the ice freezing rapidly to the 
bottom, or even imbedded by a severe and rapid freeze at the beginning of winter. 
The chubs, suckers and trout escaped because they kept in the deeper water, 
which had not been exhausted of its air, or gathered around the mouth of in- 
flowing streams, where small spaces are usually kept open all winter by the current. 
The pickerel delayed seeking the deeper waters until it was too late, and they 
were imprisoned. 

The success which almost invariably attends winter fishing through the ice 
is due to the fish being attracted to the holes in quest of air. Some species of 
fish consume far less oxygen than others, and will therefore survive conditions 
which would be fatal to those. This will also partly account for the immunity 
of the chubs and suckers, while the pickerel died. 

Mortality of fishes in the ocean is often caused by sudden changes of tem- 
perature occasioned by the shifting of marine currents, just as sheep and cattle 
in the Southwest are killed by a dry norther. 

Sometimes fish are poisoned by the sudden outburst of subterranean mineral 
springs or volcanic upheaval. Indeed, may they not, like terrestrial organisms, 
be subject to epidemics and plagues, fever germs and the numerous fatalities 
which result from sudden exposure to changes of temperature, or even of un- 
familiar agencies which pervade the air, the water and the submerged land. 
There are analogies throughout all nature, which if compared together, account 
for much that is inexplicable. It is chiefly those things not seen which are 
mysterious. 

"holding hard and killing quick.'' 

In an issue of The Angler the editor recalls some angling reminiscences at 
Yankee Dam, on the Schuylkill, where he had some sharp work with a black bass. 
He speaks of holding hard and killing his fish quickly, and invites criticism of the 
method and performance; therefore, I am free to say that, under the conditions 
illustrated, I do not see what else he could well do. Indeed, it was masterly work. 

Inexperienced anglers should learn and remember that in the rough water 
under all dams and natural waterfalls there is always a backset and undertow, 
which operates greatly to the angler's advantage. It is to his interest to keep the 
fish within the swirling water, and not let him run out into the uninterrupted, 
swift current below. In the latter case, unless he gives line freely, he must break 
tackle or lose fish ; for the direct result of holding hard then is to bring the fish 
to the surface of the water, where the great force of the current would of itself 
tear the hook out, unless it was so securely fixed, and the fish so heavy, as to 
cause some part of the tackle to give way. 

While holding a fish hard in the swirl the great knack and point is to so 
counteract the leaps which he will be sure to make that he will not be able to 
throw himself off the hook. The strain of the tense arch of the rod is something 
immense. Instinct seems to teach the fish to take advantage thereof by leaping 
clear of the water, so that, by momentarily relieving the strain, he may free 
himself of the hook. In this little game he will generally succeed, if insecurely 
fastened, unless the angler instantly responds by lowering the end of his rod to 
a plane parallel with the level of the water. He must repeat this with each up- 
ward leap of the fish, often two or three successive times in a minute. This is 
what gives excitement to the sport far beyond that experienced in sluggish or 



WHY FISH DOxNT ALWAYS BITE. 109 

still water. It is a battle of muscle as well as of tact and stralegem ; and when 
you finally bring your fish captive to your hand, you not only experience a natural 
thrill of joy at your success, but you entertain such a respect for your fish as 
will magnify your own self-importance many fold. In fishing short salmon pools 
in heavy water there is no other resource but to "hold hard and kill quick." The 
salmon must be worked toward the head of the pool (they almost invariably 
take the fly at the foot), and brought to gafif at the earliest possible moment; 
for if they are once allowed to run out of the pool into the dashing raceway 
below, one might as well try to hold a locomotive with a clothes-line. 

In following this advice to "hold hard," there is always danger that the 
pupil will fail to temper his strength by that delicacy of manipulation which can 
only be acquired by frequest tests through long experience. A familiar illustra- 
tion of this is the tendency to jerk a fish bodily out of the water as soon as he is 
on the hook. What is meant to be sport then becomes nothing more than a 
combined mental and physical spasm. Old anglers learn to weigh mechanical 
forces with a keen perceptive sense, which enables them to determine when their 
rods are overtaxed, just as they can tell, by an intimation of the spine, that they 
are lifting too much. 

After all, there is something more in the science of angling than the agnostics 
seem willing to admit. It can be measured only by the multiplicity of conditions 
under which it is pursued, and he who attempts to "hold hard" when he ought 
to touch lightly will find himself in a worse predicament than the Frenchman 
with his head out of a car window, who cried, when he had barely escaped being 
hit by a bridge : "What for you tell me to look out, when I should look in ?" 

WHAT IS FLY FISHING? 

Don't you som.etimes feel like leaving the beaten path by the river when 
your correspondents sail up to you with their cork helmets a-cockbill and begin 
to talk about the advantages of shotting your fly, of letting it sink a foot or so 
beneath the surface, of using a stiff rod for better effect in casting, and all such 
sort of loose talk? I say, is there any sense in it? 

I don't object at all to the methods, but I write to ask why their use and 
practice is designated "fly-fishing?" That is what I am awake to know! 

What is a fly? Is it an insect which dives, which lives under the water, 
which goes to the bottom water-logged, or double-shotted like a corpse over the 
side, at sea? Not at all! It is a creature of the upper air and surface — ephemeral, 
lambent, light as thistle-down, erratic as a feather, now touching the water, anon 
darting into midair, here an instant and gone the next, restless as a humming- 
bird, never still. Do you not perceive, then, that when you handicap an artificial 
fly with a weight, however trifling or minute, you immediately take it out of its 
class, because it is a fly no more? It has not even the capabilities and attributes 
of a beetle, or grasshopper, or any other clumsy insect which happens to have 
wings. It has no buoyancy or vitality. It cannot rise, or even maintain itself on 
the surface unless the current be swift. It is inanimate and dead. Fly-fishing 
indeed ! It isn't fly at all. True fly-fishing is an art which brooks no compromise. 
It can never be engrafted or modified. Cross it with other methods of angling 
and you have a sterile hybrid. 

In the early days the aborigines used a bunch of feathers, hair, or deer skin, 
arranged with rude regard to form and combination of colors, which they called 
a "bob." They used it with a rod and short line, after the fashion which the 



110 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

English call dabbing, or skittered it over the surface of the water ; and with it 
they caught many goodly bass, trout and pickerel. This primitive lure was really 
a home-made hackle, and the way in which it <vas used was much nearer akin 
to true fly-fishing than any sub-aqueous method employed since. Improvements 
on the bob began when contrivances were deftly fashioned into close resem- 
blances of natural objects, the outcome of which has developed into the marvelous 
artificial fly of the present day. The moment metal attachments were devised 
and applied for the purpose of intensifying the lure, or to imitate aquatic objects, 
the evolution of the spoon began; and the greater the progress we make in per- 
fecting the spoon, the further away we depart from its origin and germ, the 
primitive bob. There are composite plants which yield diametrically opposite 
products. Just so the bob is the parent of both fly and spoon ; but we can never 
interchange one for the other in the correct practice of arts so far asunder as 
trolling and fly-fishing. Engineers might as well try to use a diving bell for a 
floating battery. The ostrich, with his rudimentary wings might vie with the 
condor of the Andes in flight. 

I am opposed, Mr. Angler, to combination implements and makeshifts of all 
sorts. A mechanical jack-at-all-trades simply ruins the brotherhood and demoral- 
izes the craft. Give me fly-fishing in its purity — or give me worms. 



. CHAPTER XXIII. 

"fYSSHE ANn FYSSHEVNGE." 
[Before the ^Minnesota Academy of Sciences, ISSl.] 

Thus as written, wrote Dame Juliana Berners four centuries ago. We do not 
spell it that way nowadays, but the subject stands the same, unchangeable, fixed, 
eternal. The same interest invests it now as then; the same enthusiasm is kindled 
in old and young alike. In infancy it is the initial out-of-door pastime. When old 
age has outlived its usefulness, it still can fish ; and even after the mortal coil is 
shufHed ofif there gleams a constellation in the heavens, beyond the dead line, to 
illuminate the angler's path to glory! Thus from the beginning of antiquity, when 
"the waters covered the face of the earth," until the ultimate end of time, the art 
and the subject are alike illustrated and ennobled. The pride of his calling dig- 
nifies the fisherman, while topics much less scaly fail to win equal plaudits for 
the pen. 

From the days of Oppian, who was chief poet of the second century, until the 
most recent rhapsody of the modern author, the art of angling has been chanted 
in song and expatiated upon in prose. Prof. J. J. Manley, of London, tells us that 
there are no less than 800 books on angling and cognate subjects. The literature 
of angling embraces the names of some of the most distinguished men of the cen- 
turies. Angling is a standard gossip in the tackle shops and around the camp fire. 
It is a subject on which any self-constituted censor may assume to talk intelligently. 
So kaleidoscopic are its phases that none may venture to gainsay the most random 
statements; so tuneful are its changes that it never grows trite. Its associations are 
hallowed by its "ancient and fish-like smell," like the old wines of Tokay and 
Johannisberg by the must of the cellars. Nevertheless it is an uncertain field of 
research, and I approach it with some such wariness as I would an old root under 
a river bank, stuck full of fouled hooks, and bristling with broken snoods and bits 
of line, knowing full well, from the circumstantial evidences, that there is a big 
fish under there difficult to handle. 

Ah ! here we have an immediate suggestion of the charm of angling. A big 
fish difficult to handle ! Herein consist the challenge and incentive to any essay of 
personal skill. How the wary old fisherman will rub his hands and chuckle, as he 
cunningly selects and adjusts his most captivating lines, to victimize that educated 
fish who has outwitted all before him ! How carefully he lays out his lines and 
establishes his approaches ! And if he can only once get fairly hung of that fish, 
what a crown of glory will he begin to burnish up for himself ! 

But I do not intend a tilt in the open field of angling. I will not even attempt 
to epitomize a subject of such vast amplitude and illimitable ramifications. I am 
a free lance, merely touching a few salient points with the lambent flight of the bee. 

Imprimis, I find that there is a certain kind of ozone in the spring atmosphere 
which makes an angler wish to go a-fishing. He takes to water as naturally as a 
duck. Thenceforth what enchantment invests the dark and shadowy river with its 
varying mood and cadences; the rattling ripple and the murmuring eddy; the pale 
buds of springtime and the umbrageous fronds of June ; the catcall of the jay and 

(111) 



112 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

the rasping trill of the kingfisher ; the cdor of the ferns and the sweet breath of the 
opening flowers ! 

No wonder that the ardent angler takes the spring fever and begins to lift down 
his rods from the rack and overhaul his tackle. Even the small boy catches the 
infection and sighs for the waterside as he sits on his workbench and whispers : 

"Father! they say — the trout — bite — good — now!" 

"Bite, do they? Well, well; you stick to your work and they won't bite you." 

What a Babcock extinguisher to the youthful fire ! "Truth crushed to earth 
shall rise again;" but what of ambition thus mercilessly nipped in the bud? Where 
is Izaak? Shades of the departed! 

There are those who affect to despise anglers. Perhaps they associate them 
with worms? Well, none of us should be too fastidious. One common destiny 
waits on us, and all will have to succumb to it sooner or later. We are liable, at 
any time, to furnish ground bait for bottom fish. 

It is not for me to champion the Fraternity of Fishermen. They are abundantly 
able to speak for themselves. Even the fisherwomen are lusty in their self-assertion. 
It is hard to circumvent the eloquence of Billingsgate. 

Daniel O'Connell and Richard Brinsley Sheridan both tried to talk down the 
fish wives. The great counsellor even went so far as to call one of them an "old 
hypothenuse !" but she berated him into ignominious flight ! 

(That was the last of the O'Connells.) 

Heroicjilly she defended the well-earned reputation of the craft, intensifying 
with glowing visage the reflected luster of the emblematic twelfth sign of the 
zodiac — "In hoc signo vinces." 

Numerically, the angling fraternity is a power. In the city of London alone it 
is said there are nearly 100 clubs, with a membership of 3,000, to say nothing of 
as many more regular anglers who do not belong to clubs. 

In America are at least 100 organized angling clubs, with an average member- 
ship of over thirty persons. That this constituency is recognized as a power in the 
United States is demonstrated by the deference shown to sportsmen by hotel pro- 
prietors and transportation lines all over the country. Special excursion tickets are 
issued every season by many railroad companies, and some of them furnish excur- 
sion cars expressly fitted up for sportsmen, with sleeping bunks, kitchen apparatus, 
rod racks, etc. One line defers so particularly to this class of patronage that it has 
dubbed itself "The Fishing Line." For several years many railroad companies have 
catered especially to the anglers and sportsm.en in general — their roads reaching 
many of the finest fishing localities on the globe. In Worcester, Mass., there is 
an excursion car company which leases cars to sportsmen, fitted up with every 
appliance suited to their requirements. Parties pay so much per day and travel 
wherever they wish, ad libitum. 

Many of the most enthusiastic anglers are the railroad officials themselves. A 
fellow feeling, therefore, makes them wondrous kind. Let us be grateful, then, for 
the cordial sympathy thus begotten, and hasten to avail ourselves of the facilities 
which they provide. Now is the accepted time : 

"Oh, while fishing last, enjoy it; "He who clothed their banks with verdure, 

Let us to the streams repair; Dotted them with various flowers, 

Snatch some hours from toil and study, Meant that ye, tho' doomed to labor, 

Nature's blessed gifts to share. Should enjoy some cheering hours; 

Ye, who stand behind the counter, Wipe your reeking brows, come with us, 

■Or grown pallid at the loom, With your basket and your rod, 

Leave the measure and the shuttle. And with happy hearts look up, from 

To the rippling stream come, come! Nature unto Nature's God." 



"FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYNGE." 113 

It is said "There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it." We 
know that many families of fishes have become totally extinct since the initial epoch 
of creation; but of those now in existence the total number of admitted species of 
fishes inhabiting the water-s of the United States is something over 1,400, the num- 
ber of genera about 200, of families thirty-two. 

Science divides the different races or groups of the world's fauna into classes, 
orders, sub-orders, families, genera and type-species. Apparent species of fish fauna 
are so numerous as to receive no attention from ichthyologists, unless they are 
verified by typical examples. 

Of the thirty-two families referred to, most are fit for food, though a very 
large proportion have hitherto been rejected from the table. 

Within two years, however, a club has been formed, with headquarters at New 
York, and a large outside membership, for the express object of utilizing as food 
what has hitherto been considered noxious or inedible. Qualified candidates must 
have no gorge or compunction of stomach, and at stated dinners the initiated 
ichthyophagi get away with an incredible lot of skates, shark fins, toadfish, lam- 
preys, blowfish, sea cucumbers, echini, horsefish, sea spiders and the like. 

A correct taste, however, long ago evolved and established four of the thirry- 
two families as the choicest for food. These are the Salmonidse, which include the 
trout, salmon, grayling, whitefish, charrs and smelts, represented by about forty 
varieties; the Centrarchidse, which include the bass, sunfish and perches, in variety 
about sixty ; the Esoscidse. which includes the pikes, pickerels and muscalonge, and 
the Cyprinidse, a very numerous tribe of dace, carp, chubs, etc. 

These four families represent both of the great diversions of Acanthopterigii, 
or spiny-finned fishes, and the Malacopterigii, or soft-rayed fishes ; and it is a 
gratifying coincidence that these fine edible fish are the ones which aflford the 
keenest sport to anglers. They are not only the most active, the most symmetrical 
and the most beautiful in colors, but they are universally distributed among the 
bright golden spots of earth. Their habitat is where the wood nymphs dwell, where 
the birds carol, the gaudy butterfiies flit and the bees drone; where crystal foun- 
tains gush, and the green moss grows vivid in the spray; where every combination 
of romantic rockwork, waving foliage and tracery of ferns and trailing vines — 
of gentlest nature, animate and inanimate — combine to reproduce an Eden. 

Wherever the leaping trout and sturdy bass are found there are no snakes. 
In the deep seclusion of these Edenal retreats no noxious serpent lurks. In this 
paradise without a devil, the harassed and toil-worn voyager seeks rest and quiet 
retirement, and the poet draws his inspiration : 

"Sweet Nature around me; the world's trovibles far, 
Believe me, we fishers philosophers are." 

While all the four great families referred to are widely distributed throughout 
the temperate zone, the Cyprinoids are found chiefly in sub-tropic belts, and actually 
thrive in the hot and tepid rivers of Arizona and New Mexico. The goldfish, which 
is one variety of the family, is easily raised in warm, muddy water, and cannot 
stand too cold a temperature. He grows fat on a simple diet of bread crumbs, and 
with this homely fare is happy. The Salmonidse and many of the Centrachidse, to 
which the basses belong, are not found in strictly sandy regions. Trout are finest 
in granite formations, and bass in limestone, though both are found in each. The 
Esoscidje, or pikes and pickerels, thrive in both rocky and sandy tracts, in clear 
running water and in turbid, sluggish ponds alike. They are particularly fond of 
swamps and marshy places. 



114 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

All of these fish will, at times, take the artificial fly, the trolling spoon, the live 
minnow or the still bait. 

Besides these, there are the Siluridse, or catfish ; the Clupidse, which include the 
herring and shad ; the Hyodontidje, or moon-eyes— a large-eyed fish allied to the 
herrings, and the Scienidse, or sheepshead, which afford good sport to the angler 
and are fairly edible food. The habitat of these is chiefly in Western waters. Sev- 
eral of them will take the fly, others a ground bait. The moon-eyes, or "golden 
eyes," as they are sometimes locally called, run in schools, and often give pretty 
fly-fishing in many of the tributaries of the Red River of the North, flowing through 
Northern Minnesota. 

The great majority of people cannot distinguish one family of fish from an- 
other. Indeed, they cannot even distinguish the common varieties of the common 
domestic animals— the horse, cow, dog or pig ; yet these varieties are very numerous. 
On the show bench at the great dog show in New York last April, for instance, 
there were sixty varieties of dogs. 

We do not determine species by their colors, although colors are an indication — • 
but by their specific characteristics or anatomical structure. 

Now, an expert ichthyologist ought to be able to determine the leading families 
of fishes equally as well in the dark as in the light, by simply passing his hands 
over their bodies. Here are a number of specimens before us. Note the arrange- 
ment, position and number of the fins, some prickly, some soft-rayed, some adipose; 
the scales of different shapes and sizes, large, small and indefinable ; the opercles 
or gill-covers round, ovate, elongated; tails forked, crescent-shaped, square; snouts 
elongated, snubbed or retrousse; mouths of varying sizes and shapes, some bristling 
with teeth, others smooth as an infant's gums. A blind man should be able to 
read all these signs with more accuracy than the embossed literature of asylums. 

Everything in nature has its counterpart. There are analogies throughout all 
the kingdoms of creation. If we reason from analogy we are not liable to go far 
astray. Observation made by actual comparison must be correct, as a general rule. 

That we discover that fishes have all the five senses; that they can see, hear, 
taste, smell and feel ; that they think, reason and sleep ; that many of them produce 
vocal sounds, some of which are strictly musical. The stories of the singing fish 
of Ovid, Pliny, and other ancient writers, are not mere fables. I suppose I have 
myself heard vocal sounds from at least a dozen varieties of fish, notably, the 
sheepshead, or river drums of Western lakes, and the malasheganies of the great 
lakes, and on the -sea coast the gurnards and drums. The drums are often heard 
on the ocean bottom, while the sea robins, weak fish and grunts always croak when 
lifted by the angler into the bottom of the boat. It is even maintained by some 
accepted authorities that fishes can communicate with each other by sounds. If 
they can they have never told me, and had they done so I should be too gallant 
to give away their secret. But although I have not heard them converse in ichthyo 
language, I have noted the wink of the eye, the twirl of fin, the sign manual, and 
the tactical movement, which would do credit to stage pantomime or a plain Indian. 

In the Western river drums, or sheepshead, the sources of the sounds are two 
small ear bones (located in the head, of course). They are of the size and shape 
of tamarind stones, and when dry resemble milk quartz. They are popularly known 
as "lucky stones," and many persons carry them in the pocket to woo the fickle 
Goddess of Fortune. 

Fishes of the same river and brook have different complexions and varieties 
of visage. Those who are familiar with them, as fish culturists, or those who 



"FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYXGE." 115 

propagate them, can distinguish some of them from others as readily as a farmer 
can the cows or sheep of the same herd or flock. Fish, however, change their com- 
plexions, and are liable to become light colored or dark, according to the surround- 
ings, just as men become pale in the office or house, and tanned, freckled or red- 
dened in the sun. 

Trout, having no perceptible scales, and a skin of delicate texture, are more 
sensitive than any other fish. Seth Green boldly declares that "trout can be bred 
to any color, shape or flavor, by feeding and change of ponds, with as much nicety 
and certainty as a cattle fancier breeds his animals." 

It is a physical fact that all wild beasts, birds, reptiles, and even insects assim- 
ilate to the color of the surroundings. 

All fish, like other creatures, have their diseases and their enemies. Most 
especially are they troubled with parasites and entozoa. Each family of fish has its 
own particular parasite, and none other. These generally attach themselves to the 
bodies of the fish behind the gills or fins, so that they cannot be rubbed ofif, and 
suck their substance until they die. There are no less than 126 kinds of tremotoda, 
or "fluke," found in fishes. (See Dr. Cobbold's Synopsis of the Distomidae.) Th? 
treads worm and tape worm are the most common entozoa. Two years ago 1 
fished the river Godbout, on the Lower St. Lawrence, and found them in every 
trout and salmon taken. They infest the intestines, and I cannot learn that the 
flesh suffers detriment therefrom or that injurv results from eating it 

There is a great water beetle which is the especial enemy of the trout. It iy 
about three inches in length, has large, strong wings, long sharp mandibles and 
sharp, hooked claws. It is equally at home in the air. in the water and on land. 
It can fly, swim and run. For the poor trout which it has marked for its victim 
there is no escape. If the fish attempts -to flee through the water, it pursues ; if 
it rises to the surface, instantly the bettle rises in the air, and hovering over it like 
a hawk, pounces on its back and fixes his inexorable claws into its flesh. Then it 
attacks him with its beak, and so destroys him. No Nemesis was ever so persistent. 

Like the rest of animate creation, fish do not all live or feed alike, or occupy 
the same localities. There are fish carniverous, vegetarian and insectivorous; fish 
predatory and fish pastoral ; fish local and fish migratory Fish also adapt themselves 
to their various requirements of temperature, quality of water, shelter, security and 
reproduction. The angler who studies their habits, of course, knows where to 
find them. 

Take the great lakes for example. Where the shores are precipitous and rocky 
and the water deep no fish will be found, because they can find neither food, shelter 
nor spawning bees. Knowing this, the fishermen waste no time in useless quest, 
but follow them to the shoaler water, shelving beaches and sheltered coves, where 
they sweep them in with seines by myriads. In the winter these bays and coves are 
covered with ice, and the fish naturallv resort there tor shelter from storms and 
for warmth and food. Then the fishermen congregate to the spot by hundreds. 
Whole villages of huts cover the ice field, and men, women and children are busy 
day after day catching them with hook and line through holes cut in the ice. The 
fish are easily captured, for they are desperate for fresh air. The greater part of 
the oxygen has been exhausted from the long pent-up water, since the lake first 
froze, and they rush to the holes for atmospheric air. just as half-suflfocated persons 
would do to an open window in an ill-ventilated room. 

Fish live on air, like animals. Their gills are their lungs; just as our warm, 
red blood is purified and restored in its vital and arterial qualities by air passing 



116 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

through our hings, so is the cold, red blood of fish by passing through their gills ; 
and as by the process of breathing we extract the oxygen and vitiate the air, in 
like manner do fish taking the water in their mouths, extract from it the air held 
in suspension, and pass it out under the opercles, or gill covers, in a vitiated state. 
A fish can be drowned in the water almost as easily as an animal, when the water 
is prevented from passing over the gill covers in the usual way. For this reason 
fish seldom swim down stream for any great distances at a time, and always 
"heave to," as sailors would say, head up stream. Anglers take advantage of this 
knowledge and kill their captives secundem artem. Often fish actually die in smaller 
lakes and ponds when closed by ice simply for want of air, and when their dead 
bodies are found floating on the surface in the spring, after the ice has broken up 
and melted, people wonder at the mortality, and speculate upon the cause of the 
mysterious (?) epidemic. If they had thought to cut holes in the ice at intervals 
throughout the winter this great waste of fish food might have been prevented. 

It is this constant drain upon the fish supply at all seasons of the year, in and 
out of spawning time, which excites a well-founded apprehension that it will soon 
give out, especially in Lakes Erie and Michigan, where the shores are favorable for 
fishing and the fishing stations numerous. 

As in the great lakes, so in the rivers and creeks, the small lakes and ponds, 
fish will be found where the conditions already specified are the most favorable. 

Black bass spawn in May, seeking some retired spot in shallow water where they 
scoop out nests in the sand and gravel, and glue their ova to pebbles on the bottom, 
standing guard meanwhile near the deposit to keep off predatory intruders. It is 
this fidelity which makes the black bass so prolific. Other fish usually lose 95 per 
cent of their spawn. After ten days or so the young fry hatch out and scatter into 
deep water, where they are comparatively safe from predatory fish. This is a 
masterly precaution. Most fish fry keep near the shore, and thereby fall a prey 
to skulking pickerel, perch and sunfish. Bass are not the spawn destroyers which 
some suppose them to be. They are omnivorous and content themselves with 
larvae, beetles, crayfish, water fleas and helgramites, varying their diet with occa- 
sional meals of fish — but not always on Fridays. 

From June to August the best fishing places are in deep pools of rivers or under 
the shadows of dams and falls. From the middle of September to the end of October 
they seem to resort more to the deep currents of the midstream. In lakes they lie 
under the brush of fallen trees or along the edge of lily pads which line the shore, 
and near submerged points of rock. Very often they are found near sunken ledges 
of rock in the middle of the lake. They take the fly, grub, minnow or trolling spoon. 

Trout are well scattered during May and June, both in lake and river. In 
streams and rivers they are most surely caught where the current is obstructed by 
boulders. Later in the summer they are found in deep holes where there are cold 
bottom springs, and by September they seek their spawning beds. They take fly, 
grub, worm and minnow. 

It is pretty hard to tell a novice where to find 'trout. An expert angler will lose 
no time in testing doubtful or impracticable places, but seems to know the correct 
spots by an intuitive perception. In May or June, if he discovers a clump of over- 
hanging bushes such as certain ephemera would use to deposit their eggs on, he 
will be apt to cast his line there, knowing that the pupa cases are ripe and liberat- 
ing the flies, and that there the .trout will congregate to feed. If he detects a 
stream trickling down the bank, carrying the landwash from the muck and rotten 
leaves above, he will put in his hook there, because a good supply of larvae and 



"FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYNGE." 117 

vegetable food will float in wifh the debris. Thus he puts some trifling knowledg; 
of natural history to good practical uses. Indeed, without such knowledge no one 
can be a first-class angler. 

Angling books and tackle dealers are apt to lay great stress upon the importance 
of selecting particular flies for the different months or for the different parts of 
the day and the varying moods of weather. A very thin stratum of logic underlies 
this theory, based simply upon the fact that certain species of flies hatch out at 
different times ; to which may be added the reasonable and evident truth that bright 
flies are best on dark days and neutral tints in sunlight. As a rule, trout will take 
almost any kind of artificial fly except when some certam variety of natural fly li 
prevalent, and then they will take only a correct imitation. 

My own stock of flies is always large, but is seldom drawn on, except for a 
f^w certain sizes adapted to the season and weatner. I don't go so much into the 
nice perception of varieties as books would have us infer that expert anglers and 
wise trout do. Nevertheless it is necessary that dealers and makers should have an 
infinite assortment of devices and combinations of colors and materials with fancv 
names; and any angler of notorietv who is not an adept in the vernacular, and 
wise in supposed occult mysteries of the art, is in danger of being voted an igno- 
ramus and a pretender. 

Trout accustom themselves to a particular kind of food ; and then they will 
take no other. This has been ascertained by fish culturists. They can be taught 
to confine themselves to an exclusive diet of liver, maggots, curds or fish. 

On the north shore of Lake Superior, where the shores are rocky and pre- 
cipitous and the water very deep, they can scarcely be caught with any bait but 
minnow, because they get no other food there. Still, they do not altogether lose 
their natural instinct to pursue any moving object, and sometimes fasten to a tly. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

"fysshe and fyssheynge" (concluded). 

[Before the Minnesota Academy of Sciences, 1881.] 

To enumerate .the habits of the long list of so-called game fishes and describe 
their habitat and the different modes of capturing them would occupy a large volume. 
Such a book I published not long ago, after two years of laborious preparation. It 
is called the "Sportsman's Gazetteer," and embraces upward of 900 pages of print. 

I have already spoken of the antiquity of angling. Professor J. J. Manley, of 
London, has collected sundry Biblical references to its early history. Job says : 
"Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou 
lettest down? Canst thou put a hook in his nose, or bore his jaw through with 
a thorn?" 

From this brief passage it would appear that only hand lines or drop lines were 
in use in Job's period. I assume that rods were then not known. The hooks were 
made of wood, and quite probably of literal thorns. Even in the present day the 
Indians of Arizona and California use for hooks the thorns of a species of cactus, 
which are very tough and bent to proper shape by natural growth. The points are 
very sharp, and I should much prefer them to many of the inferior modern hooks, 
which are poor quality and badly tempered. All aboriginal hooks are made of wood 
or bone and are without barbs. The Japanese use barbless hooks, and it is worthy 
of rerhark that many modern anglers advocate the primitive pattern. Seth Green 
will not use hooks with barbs. 

In the books of Habakkuk we read of fish being taken with an "angle." Isaiah 
speaks of those who "cast their hooks into the river," indicating evidently that rods 
were then used. 

Angling with rod and line, and with the hand line alone, were practiced and 
well understood early in the Christian era. In the New Testament we read of 
Peter taking a fish with a hook; and furthermore it had a piece of silver money in 
its mouth ! However, there was nothing strange about that. We read every season 
of fishes being caught with miscellaneous collections in their pockets sufficient to 
stock a small museum. The accidental dropping into the water of a silver coin 
and its pursuit by a fish which darted after it led to the invention of the spoon 
hook or troll. 

It does not appear that reels were in use in the early centuries. The reel is 
an invaluable adjunct to facilitate the capture of big fish; and to take in a fifty- 
pound anthia from Lake Tiberius or the classic streams of ancient Greece without 
one must have required the skill of an expert worthy to chalk his name high up 
beside those of the mo.st illustrious anglers of modern times. 

Here is a graphic description of fishing with a rod, written by the poet Oppian 
in the second century. I find it in Manley's book. It would do justice to anything 
written since, and proves that the poet understood the art of angling thoroughly. 
It makes one feel that the fishermen of old were of the same stuff as brothers of 
the angle now : 

( 118) 



• "FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYNGE." 119 

"A bite! Hurrah! the lengthening line extends! He mounts, he bends, and with resilient leap. 

Above the tugging fish the arched reel bends! Bounds into air! There see the dangler twirl, 

He struggles hjird, and noble sport will yield Convulsive start, hang, curl, again uncurl, 

My liege, ere wearied out, he quits the field. Labor once more, like young Terpsichore 

See how he swims, up — down^and now athwart In giddy gyres above the sounding sea. 

The rapid stream — now pausing as in thought; Till neared. you seize the prize with steady wrist, 

And now you force him from the azure deep; And grasp at last the bright funambulist." 

"Funambulist" is a good word. 

The writer evidently understood the risk of losing a fish when reaching out the 
hand to take him in. There never was a hooked fish so nearly spent that he did 
not shrink or start from the hand thrust toward him — showing that he was not only 
on the alert, even at the point of exhaustion, but that he was suspicious and appre- 
hended the fisherman's motive. 

I can conceive of no better proof that fish have mental organization or instinct 
equal to animals of apparently higher order. 

Do fish think? Do fish reason? 

Undoubtedly they do. They have their plans and method, and lay out their 
schemes to capture their prey; to outwit man; to circumvent each other; to avoid 
or avert danger by precaution or flight ; to remember and avenge wrongs. Endeavors 
are almost always made by some kinds of fish to bite the angler after they are 
caught. The gapings of the jaws are not merely convulsive gasps and nervous 
spasms of the death throes. I have watched the features of a pike and seen the 
malignity and malice in his eye— a genuine malice prepense. A monster muscalonge 
alive in the bottom of a boat is almost as dangerous as an alligator of size would 
be. Therefore anglers shoot them through the head with a pistol, or stuil them 
with a club, or sever the vertebral cord with a pointed knife, before they lift them 
in. Sword fish, which have been struck with a harpoon, often attack the boat which 
has inflicted the injury. The salt water bluefish (temnodon Saltator) is one of the 
most aggressive biters I know of. There is no doubt that their efforts to bite are 
often prompted by an instinct of reprisal. They are evidences of mental organism. 

I have never seen one of the salmonidje attempt to bite, although their nervous 
gasps are good imitations of his intention. I should as soon expect to be bitten by 
a calf as by a trout. 

There are different dispositions in fishes as well as in animals, we all know. 
Indeed, the ferocity and unrelenting pertinacy of some marine species far exceeds 
those traits in any known land animal extant. 

Yet I will say this for a trout, that notwithstanding his meek and gentle dis- 
position, he will hold his own against big odds. 

In the aquarium of Messenger Bros., in Boston, were placed an equal number 
of trout and black bass, perhaps a dozen of each, graded to even sizes and weights— 
from a pound fish to a fingerling. At the close of the "circus" two of each remained 
— the two biggest trout and the two biggest bass. These did not fight any more, 
nor attempt reprisals. The entente cordiale seemed perfect. Their complete resig- 
nation to the conviction that neither was able to swallow the other was beautiful 
to contemplate. In the tussle the bass had great odds, because they were armed 
with scale armor, spiny fins and strong teeth, while trout had only velvet doublets, 
no scales to speak of and delicate teeth. How a trout can swallow a bass half his 
size seems an enigma. 

To grasp a big fish, even when he is quite exhausted by protracted exertions 
to escape, requires nerve and dexterity. You must seize him by the nape of the 
neck, and, with the thumb and finger firmly fixed behind the gill covers, lift him 
out of his element. 



120 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES." 

To obviate his possible escape under any circumstances, anglers employ a land- 
ing net. This is a scoop net with a handle. It must be slipped slyly under the fish, 
so that he will not suspect, and then be deliberately lifted upward and forward. 
This maneuver requires practice. Many an impetuous bungler loses a goodly fish 
which the angler has earned or brought to net or gafif by consummate skill and 
dexterous toil. 

The gaff is a large hook, some three inches across the bend, fixed into a handle 
from three to five feet long. It is used in the capture of salmon and muscalonge, 
for striped bass on the sea coast, and, indeed, for any large fish whose weight the 
line cannot lift. The fisherman is usually served by an assistant who gaffs or nets 
his fish after they are played out and brought to hand. ("Played out" is supposed 
to be a slang phrase, but this is the origin of it.) 

It is worthy of mention that a fish on a taut line always keeps his eyes fixed 
on the angler, and watches his motions steadily, like a prize fighter ; yet it is possible 
to slip a gaff or net under him without his observing it. 

Referring to the instincts of fish, I have been very much in the migrations of 
the fish in the tributary streams of the Red River of the North. They comprise 
several distinct families of fish — pike, perch, pickerel, sheepsheads, moon-eyes, cat- 
fish and suckers — and yet they all move out of the streams together on the advent 
of frost, knowing full well that the streams freeze to the bottom, and that they 
would be imprisoned all winter in an icy coffin, if indeed they did not actually perish. 

Many fish, however, enjoy a temporary suspension of vitality; and, after having 
been frozen up solid in blocks of ice, are as active as ever when thawed out. 

Some kinds of fish possess the power of voluntary torpidity and remain appar- 
ently lifeless all winter. A very large number of families hybernate — just as bears, 
coons and various animals do — notably catfish, eels, etc. It is said that black bass 
hybernate. 

Oppian, already quoted, also describes fishing from a boat, a very effective and 
popular method, as well as a comfortable and exciting sport. It is almost the only 
certain way of capturing large fish. He puts it thus : 

"The fisher, standing from the shallop's head. 
Projects the lengthening line and plunging lead; 
Gently retracts, then draws it in apace, 
While flocking anthias follow and give chase. 

"As men their foe, so these pursue their fate. 
And closely press the still receding bait. 
Nor long in vain the tempting morsel pleads, 
A hungry anthia seizes, snaps and bleeds; 
The fraud soon felt, — he flies in wild dismay. 
Whizz goes the line — begins Piscator's play! 
His muscles tense, each tendon on the rack 
Of swelling limbs, broad loins, and sinewy back. 
Mark yon proud form, erect with rigid brow, 
Like stately statue sculptured at the prow; 
From wavy hand who pays the loosening rein. 
Maneuvering holds, or lets run again! 
And see! the anthia not a moment flags; 
Resists each pull, and 'gainst the dragger drags; 
With lashing tail, to darkest depths below 
Shoots headlong down, in hopes to evade the foe. 
'Now ply your oars, my lads,' Piscator bawls: 
The huge fish plunges — down Piscator falls, 
A second plunge, and lo! the ensangued twine 
Flies through his fissured fingers to the brine. 



"FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYNGE." 121 

"As two strong combatants, of balanced might 
Force first esay, then practice every sleight. 
So these contend, a while a well matched pair — 
Till frantic efforts by degrees impair 
The anthia's strength, who, drained of vital blood. 
Soon staggers feebly thro' the foaming flood. 
Then dying, turns his vast, unwieldy bulk 
Re\ersed upon the waves, a floating hulk. 

"Towed to his side, with joy Piscator sees 
The still leviathan. Still on his knees. 
With arms outstretched, close clasps the gurgling throat, 
Make one long pull, and hauls him in the boat." 

There is a true piscatorial ring about Oppian's epic, but the ancient tackle was 
evidently of rude construction. His fishermen used a simple handline, with a squid 
or jug for bait. A squid is a piece of lead some three inches long, fashioned in the 
shape of a fish and attached to a hook. It is polished bright and glitters when drawn 
through the water. They are in use at the present day and not much improved 
upon the old patterns. 

The ancient fisherman kept his squid in motion until a fish struck it, and then 
handled his captive after a fashion which would not much enjoy the "ensanguined 
twine" cutting the fingers to the bone. One capture would be likely to suffice, and 
they would not be apt to come across another "first-rate day of fishing" for some 
time. To obviate such distresses the modern angler uses a rod and reel, as well 
as a rubber thumb-stall or a thick woolen mitten to protect his hand. I have seen 
a muscalonge or a striped bass make such a swift and impetuous rush that the line 
would have cut the fingers clean off if it had been held in the hand. I have seen a 
salmon-reel so hot from friction that the hand could not bear the heat. 

Jointed rods were not known to the ancients, though the present day really 
the best wooden rods are in one piece. Ferrules being less pliable than wood, impair 
the flexibility which should be distributed uniformly throughout the length of the 
rod. The advantage of sectional rods is that they are more portable, though in the 
cases of the split bamboo, the most artistic and effective rod made, the advantage 
of strength and flexibility are added from the very nature and plan of their con- 
struction. A split bamboo is ten-fold stronger and more pliable than the natural 
bamboo of which it is made. Calcutta baiiiboo is the best. The male canes only 
are used. They have less shoots. 

The chief and primary object in fishing is to catch fish — to secure the object 
fished for. Therefore it would seem at first sight that the biggest rod, the thickest 
line and the strongest hook fulfill the condition of success. The first impulse is 
to lift the fish bodily out of the water by main strength and run no risk by fooling 
with him. The first remark made of fly-rod by a tyro is that it won't hold any- 
thing. This is true. Its uses are altogether different. The fact is one cannot catch 
any but the grossest and most stupid fish with clumsy tackle. Anglers don't fish 
in tanks with tame fish. Wild fish are shy, so the rod is made light and flexible 
to reach distant localities with a long line. It is rigged so as lo fish the surface 
where grovehng fish never come. Gross fish, like dregs, hug the bottom. The finer 
variety feed near the top. It is because no single rod can do good, all-around 
service that trunk rods and combination rods are rejected by expert anglers, just 
as guns of different caliber, size and weight of ammunition are essential for dif- 
ferent kinds of game. 

The passion for angling is so strong that ardent anglers get to iove the most 
repulsive creatures from their very association. They will impale bettles, thread 



122 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

worms, fondle maggots and grubs, and manipulate all kinds of crawling, long- 
legged things without a qualm or shudder. Even ladies will do this with a keen 
zest. They enjoy the preparation of the seductive lures which are the accessories 
to the practice of the high art and are to add to their list of ichthyic trophies. Some 
of the fish culturists have maggot factories, to manufacture the daily food supply 
for their schools of fish. If people who buy home-made trout in the market at $1 
per pound only knew how some of them were bred and fed, they would hardly esteem 
them the delicacy they do. For myself, I don't stomach artificially raised trout of 
any kind. 

Some of the best anglers in the two hemispheres are ladies — many of them of 
highest rank. Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Louise, and Lady Dufferin, 
wife of the late popular Governor General of Canada, have no superiors of either 
sex. Daniel Webster's wife was the most complete angler; so is the wife of one 
of the leading officials of the Hayes administration. The Rev. W. H. H. Murray's 
wife, of Adirondack fame, is even a better angler than himself. Miss Sarah Mc- 
Bride, of Mumford, N. Y., is a most accomplished entomologist, as well as a prac- 
tical angler. Indeed, the number of good lady anglers is greater than is supposed. 

Lady Dufferin, on the river Restigouche, in New Brunswick, Canada, once 
struck a salmon at four o'clock in the afternoon, and hung to him until it was so 
dark that she couldn't see ; but her gaffer finally gathered him in. There was pluck 
and endurance ! The fish weighed twenty-eight pounds. 

When I was a boy I used to carry worms in the toe of an old shoe in my vest 
pocket. I have often held worms between my lips for convenience when both hands 
were prooccupied. They had scoured themselves thoroughly in the dry sand and 
were nice and clean, red and plump, but squirmy. I never went so far as to make 
a bait box out of my mouth, like Nigger Sam. 

Sam had a basket and pole over his shoulder, and was striking out for the creek, 
evidently going a-fishing. 

"Hallo, Sam !" said a gentleman he chanced to meet. "What are you going to 
catch this time?" 

"Yum— yum — yum — yum." 

"Anything the matter? What have you got in your mouth?" 

"Wums, for bait." 

Some of the fishing outfits of the United States and Canada are extensive, ex- 
pensive and complete, a few almost princely in their appointments. Allan Gilmour, 
Esq., of Ottowa, Canada, doubtless has the finest angling establishment in the world, 
which is maintained at an annual cost of $25,0'00. His fishing privilege on the God- 
bout river includes 5,000 acres of forest and several miles of water ; the station is 
a considerable hamlet of itself, arranged for every convenience and luxury; a beau- 
tiful steam yacht and steam tender are included in the outfit. Representatives of 
royalty are frequent guests at this establishment. 

Willis Russell, an American resident of Quebec, has six cottages on the River 
Marguerite, which are comfortably appointed for salmon anglers. 

Col. William H. Rhodes, of Quebec, and William Hare Powell, of Philadelphia, 
have luxurious establishments at Tadousac, on the lower St. Lawrence. 

C. J. Brydges, of the Grand Trunk Railroad, has a luxuriously appointed scow 
on the Restigouche, with gallery, dining hall, state rooms, promenade deck, etc. It 
is drawn up stream by horses and is named "Great Csesar's Ghost." The Princess 
Louise and Lady Dufferin have both honored this quaint craft with their patronage. 



"FYSSHE AND FYSSHEYNGE." 



123 



On the same river is a club of American gentlemen, who pay $1,000 a 3-ear 
each for their fishing privilege. 

Most of the Canadian salmon rivers are leased at $200 and upward, the lessees 
all having expensive quarters and outfits. 

"Fysshe and Fyssheynge'' have their quaint and humorous features. I doubt 
if any avocation or pastime has more of them. One of the most grotesque conceits 
in angling literature is the poem entitled "The Skeleton Angler." It will do very 
well for "last words" to this paper. The author of the verses was a London tackle 
dealer, and the eflfusion appeared originally as an advertisement of his goods. It 
is really a remarkable piece of fanciful imagination. I have copied it from Mauley's 
clever book. It runs thi:s : 



"When the clock in yon gray tower 
Proclaims the deep, still, midnight hour, 
And ominous birds are on the wing, 
I rise from the realms of the Bony King. 

"My bonny elm coffin I shoulder, and take 
To fish in the blood red phantom lake. 
Where many a brace of spectral trout 
Forever frisk, dart and frolic about. 

'Then the hyena's ravening voice 
Gladdens and makes my heart rejoice! 

"The glow worm and the deaths-head moth 
Are killing baits on the crimson froth. 

"For work bench I've the sculptpred tomb. 
Where tackled form by the silent moon; 
Of churchyard yew my rods I make; 
Worms from the putrid corpse I take; 



Lines I plait from the golden hair 
Plucked from the head of a damsel fair; 
Floats of the mournful cypress tree 
I carve, while night winds whistle free. 

"My plummets are moulded of coffin lead; 
For paste I seize the parish bread. 
The screech-owl's or the raven's wing 
For making flies are just the thing! 

"Should thunder roll from the barren shore, 
I bob for eels in the crimson gore, 
A human skull is my live-bait can, 
My ground-bait the crumbling bone of man. 
My lusty old coffin for punt I'll take. 
To angle by night in the phantom lake. 

"While Dante's winged demons are hovering o'er 
The skeleton trout of the crimson gore. 
To the blood-red phantom lake I go. 
While vampyre bats flit to and fro." 



Afterward follows an epigram : Scene, sunrise. — All the phantoms and obscene 
creatures out of sight in their little beds, and the author of the verses cheerfully 
at work in his shop at Hungerford market, where all good fishermen are respect- 
fully invited to call. 

The pathos is really too shocking to inflict upon an imagination wrought up- to 
the supreme pitch, and therefore I spare my readers the collapse which a perusal 
of the lines would be sure to entail. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

PROGRESSIVE FISH CULTURE. 

The entire number of fishes inhabiting the waters of the United States is some- 
thing over 1,400. More than 300 of these have a recognized economic value. 

The first attempt at artificial fish culture in the United States was made by Dr. 
Theodatus Garlick in 1851. 

Massachusetts established the first board of fish commissioners in 1856, to con- 
sider the practicability of artificial propagation. 

The era of practical fish culture was inaugurated in 1864. by Mr. Seth Green. 

New Hampshire appropriated the first public money for fish cultural purposes 
in 1865. Massachusetts organized the first state fish commission in 1866. 

The United States Fish Commission was established in 1871. 
The American Fish Cultural Association was established in the same year. 

Fish hatching was first publicly shown at Coup's Aquarium by Fred Mather 
in 1875. 

The first exhibition of fishing appliances was made by the Smithsonian Institu- 
tion at Philadelphia in 1876. 

Carp were introduced in 1877, and since then have been planted in 2i0,0'0'0 locali- 
ties in different parts of the country. 

Floating hatcheries were introduced in 1877. 
The propagation of marine fishes was first undertaken in 1878. 

In 1880 the grand prize of the International Fisheries Exhibition at Berlin was 
awarded to Prof. Baird as "the first fish culturist in the world." 

The steamer Fish Hawk was built for the U. S. Fish Commission in 1880. 

The steamer Albatross was put in commission in 1883. 

Thirty states and territories now have fish commissions. 

The total amount of public appropriations by the United States and the several 
state commissions up to the present year has been fully $2,500',000. 

The weight of edible fish taken from the waters of the United States is two 
thousand million pounds annually, or about forty pounds to each inhabitant. 

The value of the annual fish product is $45,000,000. 

The number of persons dependent on the fisheries is one million. 

About 12 per cent of the whole number of fishermen are foreign-born. 

The principal commercial fish products are : Oysters, cod, salmon, whales, men- 
haden, fur seals, mackerel, shad, alewives, herring, sardines, clams and quahogs, 
whitefish, lobsters, sea otters, halibut, crabs, haddock, sturgeon, mullet, shrimp and 
prawns, eels, sponges, abelones, seals and sea elephants, hake, scallops, red snappers 
and groupers, smelt, turtle and terrapin, mussels, flounders, swordfish, sea weed, 
sea salt and Irish moss. 

In the days of the early beginning a few varieties of fresh water and anad- 
romous fishes were hatched in rude hatching troughs in small hatching houses, with 
primitive waterworks of insufficient volume, by Lyman, Green, Ainsworth, Slack, 
Stone, Atkins, Brackett, Mather and a few others, but in 1877 the United States 
Fishery Commission practically took the whole matter of fish culture under its 
charge as a national enterprise. While it eagerly availed itself of all the knowledge 

C124) 




FRED MATHER, 

ANGLER, AUTHOR, FISH CULTURIST. 



PROGRESSIVE FISH CULTURE. 125 

which had already been acquired on the subject, it at once undertook to devise im- 
proved methods and appliances to expedite the work and extend its scope. Within 
the interval marvelous apparatus in astonishing variety has been invented ; and each 
new experience gained has enabled it to improve upon the old styles of boxes and 
troughs, or necessitated the invention of new devices adapted to special requirements. 
For instance, heavy eggs, like those of salmon and trout, require one kind of hatch- 
ing apparatus and a particular mode of treatment; semi-buoyant eggs, like those 
of whitefish and shad, another kind ; adhesive eggs, like those of smelt, herring and 
perch, another; floating eggs, including those of cod, Spanish mackerel and moon- 
fish, a kind so arranged as to utilize the action of the waves. 

Methods of fish culture have advanced equally with devices and apparatus. . The 
most important of these is the building of movable floating hatcheries in the form 
of barges, and steamers like the Fish Hawk and Albatross, the last named being 
1,000 tons burthen, and both fitted with every known convenience and appliance. 
By means of these steamers the results of the work are enormously increased, with 
a comparatively small increase of cost, for instead of the hatcheries being stationary, 
and operating at only one point, they may be moved from place to place, following 
the migrations of the fish, as the season advances. Steam is a most important 
auxiliary, too, for pumping water and working the various kinds of apparatus. 

With regard to transportation, immense quantities of fish and eggs are dis- 
tributed by means of refrigerator cars built expressly for the purpose, whereas they 
were formerly carried in small quantities in the baggage cars of ordinary passenger 
trains. 

Up to the present time thirty principal species have -been artificially hatched. 
These comprise the following: Brook trout, whitefish, lake trout, pike-perch, At- 
lantic salmon, shad, California salmon, striped bass, land-locked salmon, Oquassa 
trout, sea bass, grayling, sturgeon, smelt, herring, alewife, oyster, cod, haddock, 
carp, Spanish mackerel, cero, moonfish, silver gar, gold fish, tench, mountain trout 
(S. irridea) and soft-shell clams. 

There were thirteen principal hatching stations operated by the United States 
Fish Commission in 1883, to wit : Grand Lake Stream and Bucksport, Maine ; Wood's 
Holl, Mass. ; Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York ; Havre de Grace, Mary- 
land ; Washington, D. C. ; Wytheville, Va. ; Point Lookout, Md. ; Avoca, N. C. ; 
Northville and Alpena. Mich.; Baird, Cal., and Clackamas, Ore. 

Since the year 1877 the entire North Atlantic Coast from Florida to Nova 
Scotia has been made the seat of the most active operations in marine research. 
Temporary laboratories are set up along the coast wherever required, and the busi- 
ness of dredging, seining, collecting, classifying and preparing museum specimens 
is prosecuted with the utmost vigor. There is a permanent headquarters at Wood's 
Holl, in Massachusetts, where, in addition to other scientific work, the propagation 
of sea fishes is carried on extensively, and there are also stations of observation and 
labor in every important position of the coast and interior waters, where the breed- 
ing times and habits and the embryology of a great variety of fishes are studied, as 
well as special problems of temperature of water, movements of fishes, causes of 
mortality, the varieties of food, and the nutritive value of fishes, etc. 

But not only does the U. S. Fish Commission undertake this multifarious work 
through its own designated agents, experts and assistants, but it impresses into its 
service the whole fishing fleets of the North Atlantic, the signal offices of the army, 
the lighthouse keepers and lightships, the life saving and signal stations along shore; 
and it stimulates their exertions and their interest by public praise and by printing' 



126 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

their discoveries. A great many fishing vessels carry collecting tanks. In this 
manner some 60,000 specimens have been obtained and over thirty species of fishes 
have been added to the known fauna of North America. 

All these facts and many more v^ere contributed by Prof. R. Edward Earll to 
the data which Prof. G. B. Goode submitted in his address before the International 
Fisheries Conference at London, in 1883, and which have recently been printed. 
They show not only the tremendous scope of the work in hand, but the large discre- 
tionary power which the commissioner enjoys as one of the pet factors of the 
government. One of its duties is to suggest to Congress any protective, precau- 
tionary or prohibitory measures necessary for the rehabilitation of the waters of 
the United States. It has been so instructed. Now the commission has promised 
the people an abundance of fish, so that all may eat and be filled. It has promised 
them fish without legislation ; and while it does not affect to despise state legislative 
enactments as indirect aids to protection and propagation, it forbears to introduce 
the law into the hatching box. It declares, in effect, that hereafter fish shall be so 
plentiful that protective laws will be superfluous and that anglers shall enjpy the 
privilege of fishing without paying for it. Such a consummation will remove all 
disputes about riparian rights and take the gilt edge off from the eclat which at- 
taches to club membership. In the halcyon days of that coming anglers' millennmm 
trespass notices will not be any more required for private trout waters than they 
are for hen-roosts. The occupation of the big bulldog will perish, and the last 
exacerbated trousers-seat will be hung up in the National Museum as a memento 
of the dampness which once hung around a fisherman's luck. 

Note. — The foregoing cTiapter was written in May, 1885. — Editor. 




G. BROWN GOODE, 

FISH CULTURIST AND AUTHOR. 



- CHAPTER XXVI. 

RECORD OF IJFE WORK FOR FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS. 

1852-5 — Compositor and reporter, New York Journal of Commerce. 
1853^6 — Contributor to many sketch and story papers. 
1855-6 — Assistant editor New Haven Register. 
1'856 — Senate reporter, Connecticut Legislature, O. H. Piatt, clerk 
1850-61 — Associate editor New York Journal of Commerce. 

1657 — The Siege of Ft. Atkinson. Experiences on the plains. (See Harper's 

Magazine, October, 1857.) 
1858 — Visited Red River of the North (Harper's Magazine), April and May, 

1858.) 

July, steamboat War Eagle, from St. Paul (4:30 p. m.) to Prairie du 

Chien (9.15 a. m.). 

Via first railroad from Prairie du Chien to Chicago opened. 
18o!> — Opened the Aroostook to agriculture. (Journal of Commerce.) 

(Harper's Monthly.) Visits to Madawaska. Life among the loggers. 
I860 — First photos of interior Labrador. (Harper's Magazine.) 
1861 — Sea Islands of Georgia (Harper's Magazine.) 
1862 — Correspondent Morning Journal, Halifax, N. S. 
1860— Assistant editor Chronicle and Sentinel, Augusta, Ga. 

Temporary Editor Royal Gazette, Bermuda. 

Worked up resources of Maritime Provinces for the St. John Telegraph, 

and Halifax Citizen. 
1864 — Assistant editor Telegraph, St. John, N. B. 
1864-5 — Chief editor Courier, St. John, N. B. (Confederation organ.) 
1865— Editor Humorist, St. John, N. B. 
1864-66 — Broker and commission merchant at Halifax and St. John. (Firm of 

Wilkinson, Wood & Co., and Hallock, Schroeder & Co.) 
1867— Broker, 59 Beaver, New York. (Ralph King & Hallock.) 

Oyster Point town site, in New Haevn, laid out estate in streets and lots. 
1868 — Financial editor Harper's Weekly. 

The Restigouche, Bay Chaleur. (Harper's Magazine, December, 18G8.) 
1869— Worked up the Adirondacks. (Harper's Magazine.) 
1870<-71 — Founded Blooming Grove Park, Pa., with Fayette S. Giles. 

The first game preserve in the United States. 

Sheldon Wood Preserving Co., creosoted wood pavement. 

Electric boiler cleaner. Catalyzed paper. (Sunk a lot of money in these 

ventures.) 
1872 — Chatham, Nova Scotia, for salmon and canned lobsters. 

Prospected north shore of Lake Superior for mineral. 
1873 — Wrote "The Fishing Tourist." 

Founded Forest and Stream. 

Director Flushing and Queens County Bank, L. L 
1874 — Founded International Association for Protection of Game. 

(l-'7) 



128 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

1874-6 — Opened Lake Okechobee and Florida sugar planters to tourists, with 
Fred. A. Ober, naturalist and historian. 
1875' — Among the buffalo in the Indian Territory. 
1876— Published "Camp Life in Florida." (350 pp.) 

Sportsmen's exhibit at Philadelphia Centennial. (Hunters' Camp.) Medal 
18T7— Wrote "The Sportsman's Gazetteer" (900 pp.) 

18718 — Worked up moonshiners in Tennessee and North Carolina for New York 
Herald, with Major Wagner's mounted revenue police. 
Worked up Northern Michigan for G. R. & Indiana Railroad. 
1870' — Founded town of Hallock, in Kittson County, Minn. 

-Published "Dog Fanciers' Directory and Medical Guide." 
Built Hotel Hallock, at Hallock, Minn., and exploited town site; now a 
thriving county seat. 

-Donated $5,0'0O collection to Long Island Historical Society. 
1881 — Offered to Chicago the first smoke consumer and garbage burner. (My 
own invention.) Introduced steam gauge for boilers. Handled combina- 
tion standpipe and fire escape. 

Worked up Northern Pacific Railroad west to the Rockies. 
Life in Montana and Idaho. 
1882 — Worked up Canadian Pacific west to Regina and Moose Jaw. 

Winter research in Texas, Arkansas and Missouri. 
16613 — Sunflower culture for its oil product in Northern Minnesota. 
1884 — Successful culture in Minnesota of sunflowers for the oil product. (See 
U. S. Agricultural Dept.) 

South Carolina, Etowah, phosphates near Charleston. \ 

Tried to introduce automatic garbage consumer. 
Etowah phosphates. South Carolina rivers. 
1884^5 — Superintendent Minnesota Frontier Exhibit at New Orleans Fair. 
168S — Reported Manitoba Riel Rebellion for New Orleans Times-Democrat. 
Exploited chemical coal economizer on steamers and tug boats. 
188i6^9'2i — Worked up Massachusetts' abandoned farms. 
188S-6 — Visited Alaska and wrote "Our New Alaska." 
1867-8' — Prospected for phosphates and marble in Ontario, Canada. 
1889-^90 — Worked up Montana mineral district for Great Northern Railroad. 
Wrote up Yellowstone Park for Chicago Field. 
1890 — Wrote "The Salmon Fisher," edited Nature's Realm ten months. 
1891 — Introduced through Senator McMillan bill to establish Industrial Indian 
School in Pipestone, Minn., southwest corner. 
1888-98! — Worked up resources of Virginia and Eastern North Carolina. (Tide- 
waters.) 
1892 — Worked up British Columbia for Great Northern Railroad. (Lethbridge 
to Spokane.) 
1893-7 — Basket willow culture in North Carolina. 
1894^6 — Business agency and truck farm at Newbern, N. C. 
189'5-7 — Director State Dairy Association of North Carolina. 
1896-7— Edited Western Field and Stream, St. Paul, Minn. 

1897 — Formulated a code of uniform game laws, which has been officially 
indorsed by the U. S. Biological Survey. 
Life in Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama. 



RECORD OF LIFE WORK FOR FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS. 129 

1898^90— Mining broker in St. Louis, Mo. 

Life in Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama. 
1900 — Worked up Mobile (Ala.) industries for Chamber of Commerce. 
19101-03— Truck farming at Newbern, N. C. 

1904 — Half century class record (1854) Amherst. 
1905 — Natural history of Southern California. 

Built studio at National City. 
190i6^ — ^"Luminous Bodies." Metaphysical Pub. Co., New York. 
1907— "Hallock Ancestry." 

Resources of Eastern Long Island, N. Y. 
Jamestown Exposition, at Norfolk, Va. 
1908— "Peerless Alaska." 

Eastern Long Island geophysics and natural history. 
190'9 — Engaged in literary work. 
191i0-ll — Cosmogony for Harper, Antiquarian and Metaphysical Magazine. 

Active or honorary member of fifty-seven scientific, literary and game protective 
societies. Member of D. K. E. Fraternity. Member of the Masonic Fraternity 
since 185i7. Member of the Grange. Have done continuous work for Smithsonian 
since 1860. Have visited nearly every geographical division of North America, 
from ice to tropics. Have cruised the entire Atlantic coast up to Greenland and 
one-half of the Pacific coast. Have run the blockade by land and sea. Contributed 
to Harper's Magazine off and on from 1857 to 1900. Have contributed to scores 
of magazines and papers. Correspondent for Evening Post from 1868 to 1890. 
Was stockholder of Journal of Commerce from 1855 to 1879. Fitted Ober Expe- 
dition to Florida in 1874 and to West Indies in 1876. Am author of fifteen copy- 
righted works. Member of National Geographical Society and Biological Society, 
Washigton, D. C. 

Attest: Charles Hallock. August 1, 1909. 

Charles Hallock's Club Memberships. 
(Active, Associate and Honorary.) 
Honorary — Alaska Historical Society, Sitka. 
Active — American Forestry Association, Minnesota. 

" American Tract Society, New York. 

" American Ornithological Union, Boston. 

" American Forestry Association, Washington, D. C. 

" Ancient Landmark, St. Paul, Minn. 

Honorary — Anglers' Club, New York. 
Active — Anglers' National Association. 

" Art Collectors' Club, Philadelphia. 

Honorary — Ausable RiA'er Game and Fish Protective Society, New York. 

" Beaver River Club, Springfield, Mass. 

Active — Biological Society, Washington, D. C. 

" Blooming Grove Hunt Club, Pike County, Pa. 

Brooklyn Club. (1870-71.) 
Honorary — Brooklyn Gun Club. 
Active —Canadian Camp. (1905-9.) 
Honorary — Central City Sportsmen's Club, Syracuse, N. Y. 

" Central New Jersey Game and Fish Protective Society. 



130 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Active — Cosmos Club, Washington, D. C. 

" D. K. E. Alumni Association, New York. 

" D. K. E. Alumni Association, Washington, D. C. 

Honorary — Eagle Piscatory Club, Eagle City, Alaska. 
Active —Faust Club, Brooklyn, N. Y. (18'70.) 
Honorary — Forest and Stream Sp. Cktb, Brainerd, Minn. 
Forest City Gun Club, Portland, Me. 

" Forest City Gun Club, Ithaca, N. Y. 

" Gaillard Sportsmen's Club, Natchez, Miss. 

Active — National Geographical Society, Washington, D. C. 

" Greenwood Lake Club, Montclair, N. J. 

Honorary — Greenville Sportsmen's Club, Greenville, Pa. 
Gulf City Gun Club, Mobile, Ala. 

" Hallock Sportsmen's Club, Glens Falls, N. Y. 

" Hallock Sportsmen's Club, New Smyrna, Fla. 

" Hallock Sportsmen's Club, Chicago, 111. 

" Haydenville Club, Haydenville, Mass. 

" Jersey City Heights Gun Club. 

" Kennebec Association, P. G. and F., Augusta, Me. 

Active —Long Island Historical Society, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Honorary — London (Can.) D. G. F. and G. B. P. S. 

'■ Longmeadow Gun Club, Minneapolis, Minn. 

" Louisville Gun Club, Louisville, Ky. 

" Massachusetts Fish and Game Protective Association. 

" Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. 

" Minnesota Academy of Sciences, Minneapolis. 

" Multnomah Rod and Gun Club, Portland, Ore. 

Active — New England Grenfell Association, Boston, Mass. 

New York Sportsmen's Club. (1860.) 

" New York Association Protection Game and Fish, New York. (1875.) 

Honorary — Philadelphia Sportsmen's Club. (1870.) 
Active —Philistines, East Aurora, N. Y. 

" Plainfield Grange, Mass. 

" Prisoners' Aid Association, Washington, D. C. 

Honorary — Rod and Gun Club, Springfield, Mass. 
Active — Social Science Association. (1901.) 

" Tariff Reform Club, New York. 

" Thirteen Club, New York. 

Honorary — Tuna Club, Santa Catalina, Cal. (1007.) 
Summary — Honorary, 20 ; active, 28 ; total, 5'7. 

Club Membership in States. 

Alaska 2 Minnesota 5 

Alabama 1 Mississippi 1 

California 1 Ontario 1 

District of Columbia 6 Oregon 1 

Florida 1 Pennsylvania 4 

Illinois 1 Quebec 1 

Kentucky 1 New Jersey 2 

Maine .3 New York 21 

Massachusetts 6 

Total 58 



RECORD OF LIFE WORK FOR FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS. 181 

Copyrighted Books by Charles Hallock. 

18'-54 — "Recluse of the Oconee," Sunday Atlas. Herrick & Ropes. 

1®G3 — ■"Sketches of .Stonewall Jackson." Chronicle Company, Augusta, Ga. 

1873 — "Fishing Tourist." Harper Brothers. 

1876 — "Camp Life in Florida." Forest and Stream Publishing Company. 

ISIT' — "Sportsmen's Gazetteer." Forest and Stream Publishing Company. 

Wfll' — "Vacation Rambles in Michigan." Grand Rapids & Indiana R. R. Co. 

1878 — "American Club List and Glossary." Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 

1880— "Dog Fanciers' Directory and Medical Guide." Forest and Stream. 

1880— "Rub Tt Out." Crichton & Co., New York. 

1886— "Our New Alaska." Forest and Stream. 

189'0 — "The Salmon Fisher." Harris Publishing Company, New York. 

1904 — Half Century Class Record, '54, Amherst, Mass. Carpenter & Morehouse. 

19'0'6 — "Luminous Bodies Here and Hereafter." Metaphysical Pub. Co., New 

York. 
19'0i6 — "Hallock Ancestry." Carpenter & Morehouse, Amherst, Mass. 
1908— "Peerless Alaska." 
1909— "The New Cosmogony." (Not out.) 
1909 — "Autobiography of an Old Sportsman." (Not out.) 

Magazine Articles by Charles Hallock. 

Harper, October, 1857, "Siege of Fort Atkinson;" April, 1869, "Red River Trail;'' 
June, 18-59, "Red River Trail ;" March, 1860, "Life Among the Loggers ;" July, 
1860, "Hunting on Green Island;" April, 1861, "Three Months in Labrador;" 
May, 1861, "Three Months in Labrador;" October, 1863, "Aroostook and the 
Madawaska ;" December, 1866, "Secrets of Sable Island." 

Stewart's Quarterly, St. John, N. B., 1867, "The Paper of Century." 

Harper, March, 1868, "The Restigouche ;" August, 1870, "The Raquette Club." 

Galaxy, April, 1870, "Bermuda and the Blockade." 

London Field, 1887, "Angling Literature of America." 

Goldthwaite, 1891, "Underground Water Courses." 

New England Magazine, May, 1801, "Russian Fur Trade." 

Goldthwaite Geographical Magazine, 1892', "Physiography of a Pocoson." 

Springfield Republican, 1891, "Northwestern Minnesota." 

D. K. E. Quarterly, 1893, "Old Times in Achaia." 

University Magazine, 1804, "Metropolitan Workers of the Past Generation." 

U. S. Government Report, 1894, "Monograph of the Reindeer." 

New England Magazine, 1894, "A Gentleman's Estate ;" 1892, "Bermuda in Blockade 
Times." 

Railway Age, 1S9S, "First Railroad Train in Florida." 

Southern States Magazine (three papers), 1896, "Old Field Homiletics." 

Anthropologist, 1896, "Eskimo's Written Language." 

National Geographical Magazine, 1896, "Two Hundred Miles up the Kuskokwim." 

Rat Portage Miner, 1897, "Pioneer Discoveries of Gold in Ontario. 

Menorah Monthly, 1898, "Biology of the Cosmos. 

Indians' Friend, 1900, "Employments for Indians." 

Outing, 1900, "Pioneer Sportsmen of America." 

Antiquarian, January, 1902, "Ancestors of American Aborigines." 

Squire's Catalog, 1902, "Down by the Sea." 



132 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Chubb's Catalog, IflOQ, "Etchings on a Salmon Stream." 

Outing, 1902, "Marine Life on Alaska Coast." 

Everybody's Magazine, July, 19'0'2, "Delights of Salmon Angling." 

Harper, August, 1902, "Primitive North Americans." 

Southern States Magazine, lSi04, "Newbern in Bloom." 

Wiseman, 19'03-3, Electrical Body of Future Life," "Philosophy of Everlasting 

Life," "Philosophy of Religion," "The United Philosophies." 
Recreation, 1905, "The Minnesota Interlaken." 
Maine Sportsman, 1906, "Hunting the Musk Ox." 
Sportsmen's Review, 190'6, "American Sportsmenship." 
Determination, 1907, "Loves of Pocahontas." 
Kindergarten Magazine, 190f7, "Kindergarten by the Sea." 
Field and Stream, 1906, "Vanishing Moonshiner." 
Metaphysical Magazine, 1908, "Electricity the Vital Force." 
Field and Stream, 1900, "Hunt of Irish Rifle Team." 

Essays and Mongraphs. 
(Outside of stated newspaper work.) 

Halifax, N. S., 1668, "Joel Penman's Observations, or the Provinces through Yankee 

Spectacles;" 1864, "Sketches of Stonewall Jackson" (English edition). 
New York Herald, 1876, "Still Hunting in North Carolina." 
Minneapolis Academy of Science, 1680, "Fauna of Northern Minnesota.'' 
St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1861, "The Black Canon of Wyoming. 
New England Magazine, 1881, "Fysshe and Fysshe3'-nge" (a lecture). 
Chicago Field, January and February, 1882, "The Yellowstone Country" (5 papers) ; 

1882, "Red River of the North ;" "Lake of the Woods." 
American Field, 1863, "The Turtle Mountain Country." 
Brooklyn Eagle, 1863, "Development of Texas." 

Pioneer Press, 1883, "The Southwest via Missouri Pacific Railroad" (10 papers). 
Chicago Field, 1883, "Chequamagon," "Roseau Lake Breeding Grounds," "Hegira 

of the Crows," "Wane of the Aborigines." 
Orvis Cheney Volume, 1883, "Etchings on a Salmon Stream." 
St. Louis Rural World, 1888, "Sunflower Culture for Its Oil Product." 
American Field, 1884, "The Sea Trout." 

Chicago Field, 1884, "Domesticated Buffalo," "Bob Blue and His Kinsfolk." 
Chicago Field, 1884, "The Story of Oomingnoak" (musk ox). 
American Angler, 1885, "Fish Distribution in the Northwest." 
Chicago Field, 1865, "The Transcontinental Moose Path," "Buffalo in Texas." 
St. Paul Pioneer Press, January to April, 1885, "New Orleans Cotton Exposition." 
New Orleans Times-Democrat, April, 1885', "The Riel Rebellion." 
New York Sun, 1685, "Home of the Iceberg." 
Chicago Field, 1886, "Old Shad Times on the Connecticut." 
Forest and Stream, 1886, "Trout of Alaska." 
New York Evening Post, 188'6, "The Hampshire Hills." 
Brooklyn Eagle, 1886, "Turkish Americans." 

Washington Biological Society, December 3, 188'7, "The Great Roseau Swamp." 
Union Signal, January 13, 1887, "Women and Temperance in Alaska." 
Washington Biological Society, March li9, 1887, "Transcontinental Range of the 

Moose;" 1887, "Reversion of Domesticated Animals to Wild State." 




'THE DEAN," UNDER ANCESTRAL TREES, PLAIXFIELD, MASS 



RECORD OF LIFE WORK FOR FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS. 133 

Magazine of American History, April, 1887, "Making of History in Alaska." 

London Field, June, 186i7, "Angling Literature of America." 

American Angler, 1888, "In Quest of Grayling." 

Evening Post, 1888, "A Yankee in Canada." 

Forest and Stream, December 20, 1888, "Super Sense of Animals;" November II, 

1889, "Dogs of the Circumpolar World." 
Charleston News, 1880, "The Voters' Milennium." 
Raleigh News and Observer, 1889, "Qualified Suffrage." 
New York Times, 1890, "Ocean to Ocean" (six papers). 
Evening Post, 1889, "Lounging Along the Laurentides" (three papers). 
Recreation, Washington, D. C, May, 1880, "Routes of the Russian Fur Trade." 
Charles (S. C.) News, January, 1880, "Qualified Suffrage for All States." 
New York Times, October, November, 189'0, "Sketches of Montana" (six papers). 
Sports Afield, 1801, "Midwinter Rambles in the Southwest" (six papers). 
American Angler, October, 1891, "Memphremagog." 

Goldthwaite's Geographical Magazine, May, 1891, "Distribution of P'ishes by Under- 
ground Streams." 
New England Magazine, May, 1801, "Origin, Courses and Ethnography of the 

Russian Fur Trade." 
Newbern (N. C.) Journal, 1891 (Slocum Letters), "Sketches of Newbern" (twelve 

in all). 
Forest and Stream, 1892, "Winter Sports in North Carolina" (six papers), "The 

Kootenay Country, British Columbia" (four papers), "Canoe Routes of the 

Hudson Bay Company." 
Evening Post, 1802, "Annapolis by the Sea." 
Goldthwaite's Magazine, 1892, "Physiography of a Pocoson." 
Forest and Stream, November, December, 1892, "Marooning in High Altitudes." 
Iron Age, 1802, "Mesaba Iron Range" (Wisconsin). 
Evening Post, 1893, "John Coona at Christmas." 
Chicago Times, 1898, "The Princess and the Salmon." 
Hampshire Gazette, 1803, "Old Hadley." 
Evening Post, 1803, "The Ondawa" (Vermont) ; July 8, 1893, "A Boreal Arcadia;" 

September, 1893, "An Arctic Summer Trip" (Mackenzie River). 
D. K. E. Quarterly, December, 1893, "Old Times in Achaia." 
Sportsmen''s Review, 1804, "Old Kaat of Kaaterskill Clove." 

Government Print, Washington, D. C, "Monograph of the Reindeer" (Agr. Dept.). 
New England Magazine, February, 1804, "A Gentleman's Estate." 
Forest and Stream, 1895, "The Pamlico Section" (six papers), "Christmas on the 

Rio Grande." 
Sportsmen's Review, 1895, "A June Rise on the Godbout." 
Railway Age, 1895, "First Railroad Train in Florida." 
Evening Post, 1806, "Red Lake Reservation." 
Minneapolis Journal, 1606, "Game of Minnesota." 

Sportsmen's Review, 1606, "Trip Over Mountain Tops" (North Carolina). 
Samuels & Kimball, Boston, 1897, "Cape Cod Way." 
Forest and Stream, 169'0, "On the Godbout, P. Q." (three papers.) 
Raleigh News, 1808, "White Supremacy;" 1800, "The World's Greatest Explorer." 
Mobile Register, lO'OO, "The Mobile Awakening" (five papers). 
American Angler, lOOO, "On the Nepigon," "Detroit and Pelican Lakes." 
Fayetteville Observer, 19i60, "Ancestral Homes of Our Negroes." 



184 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 

Hampshire Gazette, 1900, "Courtship of Queen Victoria." 

Jacksonville Times-Union, 1900, "St. Augustine Vestibuled Train Forty Years Ago." 
Nature's Realm, 1900, "First American Zoo ;" 1901, "The Bison's Paradise." 
Mobile Register, 190i2, "Ice Architecture and Winter Carnivals." 
American Sportsman, 1909', "The Bison as a Factor in Distributing Population." 
Southold Traveler, 1909, "Eastern Long Island," "Ancient Landmarks," "Respect 
for Elders." 

Newspaper Work. 

New Haven Register Editor 

New York Journal of Commerce " 

Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and Senitinel " 

Bermuda Royal Gazette " 

Halifax (N. S.) Journal Correspondent 

Halifax (N. S.) Citizen 

St. John (N. B.) Telegraph Editor 

St. John (N. B.) Courier 

St. John (N. B.) Humorist 

New York American Angler " 

New York Nature's Realm " 

New York Forest and Stream " 

St. Paul Field and Stream " 

St. Paul Pioneer Press Correspondent 

New York Evening Post " 

New York Times " 

Sportsmen's Review " 

Harper's Weekly Editor (1868) 

Mem. — Newspaper work fills two scrap books of ledger size. 

Railroad Work. 

Worked up resources of Texas, Missouri, Michigan, Eastern Virginia, Tide- 
water North Carolina, Maritime Provinces, Minnesota, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, 
North Dakota, Manitoba, California, Western North Carolina and other states on 
the lines of Canadian Pacific, Missouri Pacific, Northern Pacific, Norfolk & Southern, 
Chesapeake & Ohio, Grand Rapids & Indiana, Chicago & Northwestern and Chicago, 
Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroads. 

Escapes and Delr'^erances of Charles Hallock. ' 

1. Wife and I derailed at pitch-dark midnight in West Virginia, one foot from 
Gurley River chasm, 90 feet deep. 

2. Caught in a narrow rock cut at Kanawha Falls, W. Va., with an express train 
dashing through. 

3. Run away with down hill at Lake Saltonstall, near New Haven, Conn., and 
saved by a miracle from plunging into deep water. 

4. Derailed and train wrecked at midnight at Lyme, Conn. 

5. Similar accident the next winter at Fort Worth, Tex. 

6. Upset in Mississippi River at St. Paul. Money loss, $1,000. 

7. Run away with down Mt. Holyoke, Mass., and buggy smashed to atoms. 

8. Fell forty feet from top of hemlock at Plaineld, Mass., and saved from being 
dashed on a rock below by an interposing dead limb wliich did not break. 



RRCORD OF U¥K WORK FOR FIFTY-F:TGHT YRARS. 1:55 

9. Saved from drowning at New Haven while liathing l^y Richard SewcU. Sank 
twice. 

10. Steamer disabled by broken piston on Pacific coast. Half a revolution more 
would have driven the piston through the bottom. On lone island ten days. 

11. Lightning struck Coliseum at Minneapolis, Minn., during Theodore Thomas' 
concert while wife was in it. 

Il2. Lightning struck and wrecked home in Kingston, Canada, while 1 w'as in it. 
19, 14. Three times lightning struck within a few feet of us both. 

15. Narrow escape at Newbern, N. C. 

16. Rusty nail in knee cap had to be pulled out by blacksmith's forceps. Three 
months on crutches. Narrow escape from lockjaw. 

17. Cannon burst and injured left hand, cutting cords. 

18. Three-horse team swamped while crossing Sauk River, Minnesota, during flood. 
Everything lost. 

19. Schooner driven through a shoal of rocky (Magdalen) islands in Gulf of St. 
Lawrence, duting tremendous gale, without striking. 

20. 21, 22. Artery of left wrist cut. Pitch fork tine in left instep. Wire file in 

palm of left hand. All serious and endangering life from lockjaw. 

23. Jaw broken and eight teeth knocked out by blow from a ruffian at Coney 
Island, N. Y. 

24. Ran blockade from Wilmington, N. C, under fire, without injury, in 186(3. 

25. Ran picket lines of both armies from Maryland to Virginia across Potomac and 
Rappahannock, in February, 1863. 

36. Fell on back in Mill Stream while trout fishing. Laid up one month. 

27. Fell on depot floor, Northampton, July 18, 1902. Sore for a month afterwards. 

28. Put out head on Brooklyn elevated station platform to see if train was coming 
on the instant that express train dashed by. A fraction of a second sooner 
would have my brains scattered over the platform. 

Mem. — God's mercy has been great ! Must have spared me for some good 
reason. Perhaps for some good purpose ? 

(Signed) Charles Hallock, August 1, 1909. 

Summary. 

Copyrighted books 17 

Magazine articles 45 

Monographs 110 

Occupations and experiments outside of newspaper work 67 

Correspondent and editor newspapers 15 

Hairbreadth escapes 28 



AUG 4 1913 



